Richard Brookhiser Quotes

Fighting a war can cost more in blood and money than any other undertaking in which nations engage.

In peace and war it's always money.

War challenges virtually every other institution of society – the justice and equity of its economy, the adequacy of its political systems, the energy of its productive plant, the bases, wisdom and purposes of its foreign policy.

… war is a matter not so much of arms as of money

There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.

War is just one more big government program.

War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end; it has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes.

Americans know that war must be paid for and it is they who must pay for it.

The most expensive peace is far less costly than the cheapest war.

No nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.

The cost of war is hard to count.

Democracies are prone to war, and war consumes them.

The war is going to end because we're gonna have such a political and financial havoc here with the devaluation of our dollar, because we just can't keep affording it. This is usually how empires end, by spending too much money maintaining their empire. We're in 130 countries, we have 700 bases around the world, and it's going to come to an end. I want it to come to an end more gracefully and peacefully, follow the constitution, and follow a more sensible foreign policy.

The Pentagon has expended stupendous sums. Yet when it comes to promised results—–disorder curbed, democracy promoted, human rights advanced, terrorism suppressed—–the United States has precious little to show.

Well, where is the money? Show me the money? Our allies have put up a few billion dollars, but the American taxpayer has been required to shoulder the burden of this war.

War, we are told, shapes character; it resolves the major questions of international politics, consolidates nations, and indeed, constitutes the principal factor in the progress of civilization through its successive stages.

The situation in the United States is becoming more dire for average ordinary Americans and the last thing we need to do is to spend money on death, destruction and war.

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.

I believe - though I may be wrong, because I'm no expert - that this war is about what most wars are about: hegemony, money, power and oil.

The unvarnished truth is that we have spent the last decade funding the machinery of war, and our children have been sacrificed.

We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

The stark and inescapable fact is that today we cannot defend our society by war since total war is total destruction, and if war is used as an instrument of policy, eventually we will have total war.

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

A devastating commentary on the war in Iraq is that we have been unable to spend money on infrastructure.