John Kerry Quotes

Benedict Arnold was a war hero, wounded in battle--before he turned against his country. Hitler was likewise a decorated and wounded veteran of the First World War. Being a war hero is not a lifetime...exempt[ion]...from responsibility for what you do thereafter.

Some general officers should pay a stricter regard to truth than to call the depopulating other countries the service of their own.

Our profession is built on the bedrock of trust - the trust that must inherently exist among Soldiers, and between Soldiers and their leaders to accomplish their mission in the chaos of war. Recent incidents of sexual assault and sexual harassment demonstrate that we have violated that trust.

I think the International Criminal Court could be a threat to American security interests, because the prosecutor of the court has enormous discretion in going after war crimes. And the way the Statute of Rome is written, responsibility for war crimes can be taken all the way up the chain of command.

Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.

Only the winners decide what were war crimes.

Goddammit, he looks like a loser to me …. When I had an officer like that in World War II, I relieved him.

As a soldier, I know that the commander is responsible for every man and every thing. The words "I apologize" may sound banal. But I cannot find any other words.

I am a combat leader. As such I am responsible for everything that is done in my unit. I just wish that our civilian leaders would accept the same kind of responsibility.

A military leader often faces a situation he has to deal with, but because it is his duty, no court can try him.

When [George W.] Bush says that Abu Ghraib was the work of a few, he forgot to mention that he was one of them.

Men who abandon their units, if there be any such, are to be hunted down and immediately shot.

My father volunteered in early 1941, before Pearl Harbor, and became an officer in the U.S. Navy. As I was growing up, he taught me the responsibility of command: A leader is ultimately responsible for every aspect of the welfare of people under his or her care. That was a deeply felt obligation in his generation.

The way the Statute of Rome is written, responsibility for war crimes can be taken all the way up the chain of command. This is the sort of investigation that some people who live in Fairyland might like to undertake, but which bears no relationship at all to conditions in the real world.

There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier's sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.

In other words, United States, our values, the way that we occupy ourselves in terms of saying here's the way we stand in this country when we go to war, it's not that we go in and we kill off anybody, including families. We don't take the riches. We don't claim the women. My God, that's not America.

You know George W. Bush is a war-time president, he says - proudly. Guess what. War is failure! When you are at war, you have failed! When you have gone to a war of choice and lied about it, you're a double-triple, triple-quadruple failure! Or a warlord. It's called a warlord in other countries. A war time president here. One man's ceiling I guess is another man's floor. George Bush is a warlord. He's a failure!

Putting up a statue to someone who tried to stop a war is not very, um, statuesque. Of course, if you had butchered five hundred of your own men out of arrogant carelessness, we'd be melting the bronze already.

George Bush is guilty of murder for the deaths of over 4000 young American soldiers who have died in the Iraqi war.

I can't destroy the whole army, and anyway [Tikka Khan] bad reputation for the events in Dacca is exaggerated.

The first murmurings from the liberal part of the U.S.A. that we were somehow in the wrong, brutal killers, bullying other countries; that we who put our lives on the line for our nation at the behest of our government should somehow be charged with murder for shooting our enemy.

When a leader encourages the culture of impunity, the society is lost and it makes the work harder for the rest of us.

Saddam Hussein, influenced by fascism, ordered the deaths of tens of thousands of people, fought two disastrous wars, turned his nation into an international pariah and ruined his country’s economy. In other words, his record is identical to George W. Bush’s.

War, even in the best state of an army, with all the alleviations of courtesy and honor, with all the correctives of morality and religion, is nevertheless so great an evil, that to engage in it without a clear necessity is a crime of the blackest dye. When the necessity is clear, it then becomes a crime to shrink from it.

Few things are more damaging to our democracy than a military officer who doesn't have the moral courage to stand up for what's right or the moral fiber to step aside when circumstances dictate.