George C. Marshall Quotes

The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire.

I used to have a little saying I used when people said, 'What are your priorities?' I'd give them a bit of government alphabet soup. I'd say 'CTCPROW: Counterterrorism, counterproliferation, rest of the world.'

Very near the heart of all foreign affairs is the relationship between policy and military power.

In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal.

One of the reasons I continue to speak out is that the solutions to the counterterrorism problem involve other parts of the national security community - especially other elements of the Department of Defense, State, FBI, Homeland Security and the staff.

The State Department desperately needs to be vigorously harnessed. It has too big a role to play in the formulation of foreign policy, and foreign policy is too important to be left up to foreign service officers.

Our safety requires a long-term military presence in the Middle East because that's where the plans to attack us are emanating.

There is no area where experience matters more than in war and diplomacy.

The Pentagon is always going to be the last to want to intervene. It is up to the civilians to tell us what they want to do and we’ll figure out how to do it.

Foreign policy is too important to be left up to foreign service officers.

Any great power—especially a great one suddenly deprived of its traditional adversary—faces the perennial dilemma of showing a reasonable return on its costly military investments.

No American witnessing the way that President George W. Bush and his generals have bungled the Iraq war can deny that our leaders, civilian and military alike, will have to get a lot smarter if the U.S. armed services are to persuade the Islamic world to embrace the blessings of democracy.

I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders. I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war and therefore prevent war from happening in the first place

Now that Washington once again has a tangible adversary -- variously described as ‘freedom-hating terrorists,’ ‘Salafist jihadis,’ or ‘Islamofascists’ -- U.S. leaders have convinced the American public that foreign policy is an ‘us-versus-them’ contact sport in which the primary tactics are military and coercive

In Washington the semantics of the military muted the reality of war for the civilian policy-makers. In quiet, air-conditioned, thick-carpeted rooms, such terms as 'systematic pressure,' 'armed reconnaissance,' 'targets of opportunity,' and even 'body count' seemed to breed a sort of games-theory detachment.

Military decisions are much more difficult and more often wrong than civilian decisions.

War should never be thought of as something autonomous, but always as an instrument of policy.

The President has full responsibility, which cannot be shared, for military decisions in a world in which the difference between safety and cataclysm can be a matter of hours or even minutes.

Political considerations can be taken into account only as long as they do not make demands that are militarily improper or impossible.

Military campaigns are inseparable from politics.

You're not hearing people like Madeleine Albright argue that the budget of the State Department should be as large as the Defense Department. The Pentagon is going to be larger by its nature. It's going to have more people.

We need, from time to time, to use military force or all of the resources at our command in order to defend the nation and defend our friends. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I think there are probably some who actually believe, if we just go talk nice to these folks, everything is going to be OK. I don't think the world works that way.

We need a president who will lead with a stronger, more consistent foreign policy. We also need our commander in chief to put more faith in military leadership who have all of the combat experience. It’s bad policy to try to micromanage too much operationally and tactically from a desk in the Oval Office.

I think I have great knowledge of - for military, and I think I have better vision for Syria than a lot of the so-called great military geniuses that are saying how to fight the war with Syria. In my opinion, they're doing just the opposite. Are we going to start World War III over Syria? Are we going to be there for the next 40 years?

No one wants to friend or follow covert info about Pakistan's nuclear policy.