Herbert Feis Quotes

Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.

For eight years, you had the Bush administration with a very interventionist policy, driving into world affairs, driving primarily into the Islamic world, army first or fist first.

It is one thing to be against unilateralism and against nonhumanitarian interventionism - but it is quite another thing to be against humanitarian interventionism.

There are, however, cases in which, while our own interests are not greatly involved, strong appeal is made to our sympathies.... in extreme cases action may be justifiable and proper. What form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances of the case; that is, upon the degree of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it.

There is no issue of greater importance to the U.S. Senate than war and peace.

Let us face squarely the paradox that the world which goes to war is a world, usually, genuinely desiring peace.

Nations drift into wars.

War as Napoleon knew it just not possible any more. However, we're very unlikely to accept or recognize 'world peace' even when we get it.

I'm sure it is, I'm not for any kind of war, we've been engaged in several wars since the second world war and we lost in Korea, we lost in Vietnam, they are political wars, they have nothing to do with any real threat, nor does this one.

We're in an illusion about what our role is in world politics and foreign affairs, and our policies are killing and destroying and doing a lot of things that we are not aware of.

First, we could have defied both of them and could have gone to war against both of these nations for this violation of international law and interference with our neutral rights.

So I think that our foreign policy, the president's strong and principled leadership when it comes to the war against terror and foreign policy is going to be an asset.

There was never a good war, or a bad peace.

Countries that intervene militarily rarely do so out of pure altruism.

It's not a choice between war and peace. It's a choice between war and endless war. It's not appeasement. I think it's better even to call it American self-interest.

It's not the job of the U.S. military to do nation-building or produce democratic utopias.

The war industry people are very together; they know exactly what they want; they don't even have to talk to each other. The peace industry people are just intellectuals who are very critical of each other... Unless the peace industry is powerful, we're always going to have war. It is as simple as that.

We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war.

A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.

From a very young age, militarism and trying to solve the world's problems through militarism is something that has always resonated with me as being a bad idea.

The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution.

War is failure of diplomacy.

It is easy to get into war, not so easy to get out.

When you decide to get involved in a military operation in a place like Syria, you've got to be prepared, as we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, to become the government, and I'm not sure any country, either the United States or I don't hear of anyone else, who's willing to take on that responsibility.

If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years, it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences.