Dwight D. Eisenhower Quotes

I don't think we should be in the business of proliferating arms sales just to protect our industrial base.

Armament firms have been active in fomenting war scares and in persuading their own countries to increase their armaments.

Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.

The arms race is worse than it ever was, the dumping of creation down a military rat hole is worse than it ever was, the wars across the earth are worse than they ever were.

Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex and the damage it could do to society.

The military market is based on human folly, not normal market precepts. Human folly goes up and down, but it always exists. It's depths have never been plumbed.

The merchants of death have provided jobs for centuries, but that's no reason to continue it.

Like all wars, conflicts bring on great opportunities for business.

Peace is costly to the profits of the military/security complex. Washington's gigantic military and security interests are far more powerful than the peace lobby.

The military budget is simply an enormous pork barrel of special privilege, the privileges taking the form of windfall profits, of no-risk profits and, most importantly, of enormous outlays of capital supplied by the Pentagon to arms contractors.

The 'defense' budget is three quarters of a trillion dollars. Profits went up last year well over 25%. I guarantee you: when war becomes that profitable, we're going to see more of it.

The world is organised by the war economy and the war culture.

The United States is the preeminent arms pusher worldwide.

The defense budget is more than a piggy bank for people who want to get busy beating swords into pork barrels.

War is a racket.... The only way to stop it is by conscription of capital before conscription of the nation's manhood.... Let the officers and directors of our armament factories, our gun builders and munitions makers and shipbuilders all be conscripted—to get $30 a month, the same wage paid to our lads in the trenches. Give capital 30 days to think it over and you will learn by that time there will be no war. That will stop the racket—that, and nothing else.

Endless money forms the sinews of war. Nervi belli pecunia infinita.

... a caricature of Mr. Military Industrial Complex.

You cannot be the arsenal of democracy if you don’t have an arsenal. We must build up our manufacturing base.

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.

The arms business is an absolutely acceptable business.

To most of America, war has become not only tolerable but profitable, and so there is no longer any great incentive to end it.

If you are going to try to go to war, or to prepare for war, in a capitalist country, you have got to let business make money out of the process or business won't work.

War provides jobs, profits, political payoffs, research funds, and forms of political and economic power that reach into every aspect of society.

Bottom line: A market approach to national defense would give us a lousy national defense.