Henry Steele Commager Quotes

While our superpower military is stunningly effective, it is also stunningly expensive.

What I say is, national defense is the most important thing we do in Washington, but there's still waste in the military budget.

The Pentagon has a long tradition of dialing up the threat to get more dollars at budget time.

The military always asks for more [appropriations] than it gets.

What chiefly governs the military budget is the need to spend enormous sums of money in a useless way. The allegedly powerful Pentagon is simply a receptacle for wasteful expenditure, just as a city dump is the receptacle for the refuse of a city.

In a democracy you get the army that the people are willing to pay for.

The defense budget has become a jobs program.

I am firmly against the kind of logrolling which would subject our defense program to narrowly sectional or selfish pulling or hauling. But I am growing pretty hot under the collar about the way my state of West Virginia is being shortchanged by the Army, Navy and Air Force.

The defense industry understands that the military budgets will continue to be cut until a new threat comes along.

The Military Industrial Complex. President Eisenhower had it wrong. It’s the Military Industrial Congressional Complex.

Sometimes Republicans want to cut the social welfare programs and yet they ask for billions and billions more for the Defense Department. I don’t take that approach.

The mainstream of both the Republican and Democratic Parties are equally committed to militarism today.

Avoid the necessity of those overgrown Military establishments, which under any form of Government are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty.

I have spoken to Donald Trump about this. He understands the dramatic budget cuts our military has faced.

If the military is to show the capabilities that we demand and expect of it, then the defense budget has to continue to rise.

I will not cut our military budget by a trillion dollars, which is a combination of the budget cuts Barack Obama has, as well as the sequestration cuts. That, in my view, is making our future less certain and less secure.

The only one benefiting from this, the American taxpayer, almost half of our taxes, our income taxes, are going to the military and to these wars.

The administration has a disturbing pattern of behavior when it comes to budgeting not only for the ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan but also for military requirements not directly related to these conflicts.

Spending an extra dollar on the D.C. public school system isn't spending an extra dollar on education. Spending an extra dollar with the Pentagon doesn't buy you an extra dollar on defense. Republicans need to look skeptically at military spending.

In Congress, while the House's proposed defense budget calls for significant increases, it also cuts 11 billion dollars from veterans spending - including healthcare and disability pay. Be clear: we can't equate spending on veterans with spending on defense.

Pentagon dollars are essentially seen as a different kind of funding that doesn't have to stand for itself and make an argument for itself in the house of Congress.

Only those who are ideologically opposed to military programs think of the defense budget as the first and best place to get resources for social welfare needs.

During the 2000 election, the current administration told our military, help is on the way. That is clearly not the case. The administration has failed to request the funds needed for the defense of this Nation. We must give the Army what it needs.

Defense is not like other discretionary spending.

It's a tough time my friends. We need to make sacrifices to ensure our troops have the tools they need in order to get the job done. This budget will help us win the War on Terror.