Robert McNamara Quotes

I love Washington, D.C.; I love this country, but I think over the last hundred years we've built up would I call an arrogant empire: people who think the rest of us are too stupid to make our own decisions.

The mistake we make with many people is that we assume that we have the model. It is a type of condescension.

I repeat that superior races have a right [to establish colonies], because they have a duty. They have the duty to civilize inferior races.

It's simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.

The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the stereotype of the ugly American - voracious, preachy, mercenary, and bombastically chauvinist - was firmly in place in Europe.

Relativity must replace absolutism in the realm of morals as well as in the spheres of physics and biology.

It is through the European that civilization arrives ... precisely because of their superiority, the civilized people our responsible for an evolving world.

The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.

... a fixed obsession on Anglo-Saxon superiority.

We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans — convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.

Nothing can justify the arrogant assumption that a clique of foreigners has the right to decide on the lives of a majority.

America's militarized brand of malignant exceptionalism is founded on the idea that the United States transcends history.

Someone once said that people on the political left think that they would do what God would do if he were as well-informed as they are.

We think we know what's right. With excessive pride comes blindness.

There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.

Roddenberry had his own utopian vision about he perfectibility of man, and I never really believed that. And I don’t think the show demonstrates that. I think it is about gunboat diplomacy. In the final analysis, the Enterprise fires. They’re always shooting and bringing civilization, and coming to worlds where they don’t approve of tyrannical enterprises – no pun intended – and they substitute their own quote unquote enlightened version of how society is supposed to work, which is essentially American.

I am number one in the world, so I have the right to be arrogant

You are not superior just because you see the world in an odious light.

We all know who the real number one is. Quite frankly, I'm the best in the world.

We cannot bring ourselves to believe it possible that a foreigner should in any respect be wiser than ourselves. If any such point out to us our follies, we at once claim those follies as the special evidence of our wisdom.

I don't apologize for my behavior anymore. Whatever I do or don't do shouldn't matter. Moral certainty is dangerous. Moral certainty is what makes people go to war unnecessarily and illegally. Morality, as any halfway intelligent human being would tell you, is a very subjective thing.

One is not superior merely because one sees the world as odious.

As a young woman, I dreamed of changing the world. In my twenties, I went to Africa to try and save the continent, only to learn that Africans neither wanted nor needed saving. Indeed, when I was there, I saw some of the worst that good intentions, traditional charity, and aid can produce.

Americans have become conditioned to believe the world is a gray place without absolutes; this is because we're simultaneously both cowardly and arrogant. We don't know the answers, so we assume they must not exist.