Rachel Maddow Quotes

I don't think a wise thing at this moment is for Israel to launch a military attack on Iran.

I could have been very popular if I had launched a military attack on Iran but I chose patience.

If they think they can get anyone who could have better handled the complex and difficult issues surrounding North Korea, Iran and other controversies, they are not understanding the world right now.

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.

You should never take military intervention off the table. When you do so, you give an out to a rogue nation or rogue actors.

By linking these countries together in his 'axis of evil' speech, President Bush implied an identity between them not only in terms of their threat, but also in terms of the action necessary to deal with the threat. A lot of work will now need to be done to delink the three, and to show why military action against Iraq is so much more justified than against Iran and North Korea.

I am saddened, saddened that this President [George W. Bush] failed so miserably at diplomacy that were now forced to war.

Israeli foreign policy makers … tend to see the world through a military prism, consistently passing up opportunities for diplomatic solutions when military solutions are on the table

The world has nothing to fear from military ambition in our Government

We can pursue peaceful diplomacy with the Iranian regime while also continuing our maximum economic pressure campaign, while also defending ourselves... To say that it's a war with Iran or nothing is just a fundamental misunderstanding of how foreign policy actually works.

I saw Donald [Trump] saying that there were some Iranian sailors on a ship in the waters off of Iran, and they were taunting American sailors who were on a nearby ship. He said, you know, if they taunted our sailors, I'd blow them out of the water and start another war. That's not good judgment.

She [Hillary Clinton] wants to start an air war over Syria with Russia, a nuclear-armed power.

It was at a certain stage (you might have forgotten, haven't you?) that the United States actively collaborated with Saddam when he was at war with Iran: weapons were supplied, diplomatic and political support was provided and so on. Then the US fell out with him for some reason and decided to do away with him.

By threatening war against Iran, Iraq and North Korea in his now-famous "Axis of Evil" address, the president painted himself into a corner. Either Bush now goes to war against one of these regimes, or he will be humiliated and exposed as a bellicose bluff.

I voted against the war in Iraq. I voted against the first Gulf War. I think war is the last resort - the last option of a great military power like us. I think that we need to focus on building coalitions. Yes, ISIS must be destroyed. But it should be destroyed by a coalition of Muslim nations on the ground with the support of the United States and the other major powers in the air and in training the troops there.

I think war and armed conflict is always the last of all the options you have on the table. I think you try to avoid that at all costs. Sometimes it's unavoidable. That's the lesson of World War II. I think the other lesson of the last 50 or 60 years, however, is that, the stronger the U.S. military, the stronger our defense capabilities, the stronger the chances for peace are.

United States has comparative advantage in military force. It tends to react to anything at first with military force, that's what it's good at. And I think they overdid it. There was more military force than was necessary.

Many Europeans are concerned that stronger sanctions are a slippery slope toward war unless the U.S. is at the table.

Surely our inaction with respect to Syria is a poor precedent if we're fighting a war on terror.

American presence is, you know, the major cause of balance of power and the stability in this region.

What Iran wants and what North Korea wants is respect.

Countries that intervene militarily rarely do so out of pure altruism.

Our nation must manage significant national security challenges over the next several years. We are already facing a potential conflict with Iraq, new challenges on the Korean peninsula, and key decisions in the president's plans to transform the military.

Going to war against Iran - whether one calls such a move 'surgical' or 'total' - would be an extremely serious undertaking; with worldwide economic, military, diplomatic and human ramifications in both the short- and the long-term.

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