James F. Byrnes Quotes

Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things, be proper and safe judges of whether a war ought to be commenced, continued or concluded.

It is easier to begin a war than to end one, which is why the decision to start a conflict should not be entrusted to the person who wages it. Post‐war presidents have abandoned this wisdom.

In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.

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.

People who start wars never know exactly how they will turn out.

Woe to the statesman whose reason for entering a war do not appear so plausible at its end as at its beginning.

Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we know it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking... Never before was it possible for one nation to make war on another without sending armies across borders. Now with rockets and atomic bombs no center of population on the earth's surface is secure from surprise destruction in a single attack.... We cannot leave it to generals, senators, and diplomats to work out a solution over a period of generations… There is no defense in science against the weapon which can destroy civilization. Our defense is not in armaments, nor in science, nor in going underground. Our defense is in law and order… Future thinking must prevent wars.

What regrets I have about being a party to killing and maiming thousands of Japanese civilians this morning are tempered with the hope that the terrible weapon we have created may bring the countries of the world together and prevent further wars.

There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in it's potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.

As Commander-in-Chief of the army and navy, in time of war, I suppose I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy.

… the bombing ended the war, and I think that it couldn't be helped.

I will not be the first American President who lost a war!

Instead of planning to deter would-be [nuclear] proliferators, U. S. policy makers have developed a preference for preventative war, They now seem to feel that deterrence is too weak to deal with radical regimes, forgetting that the precise purpose of deterrence is to counter dangerous enemies, not cautious ones.

Wars the United States starts do not necessarily end when and how it wants them to.

I've always been interested in the politics of war. War is one of those things that, the longer I studied it, the more illogical it seemed.

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.

I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.

We, Britain and Germany, can neither of us be happy about our handling of the Iraq war.

Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.

Some think the worst horrors of war might be avoided by an international agreement not to use atomic bombs. This is a vain hope.

When we analyze this war in a materialistic way and ask when is it going to end and who will be the winner and the loser, it means that we do not see the endgame.

Wars are, of course, as a rule to be avoided; but they are far better than certain kinds of peace.

My anger with the US was not at first, that they had used that weapon - although that anger came later.

We wanted this war and now we've got it, and I'm not sure that we know what to do with it.

In my experience, in bringing coercive diplomacy to bear against Slobodan Milosevic, no bomb strike was more important than maintaining NATO's cohesion.