Ban Ki-moon Quotes

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.

We need to stop spending money on those weapons systems that do not advance national security.

I cannot but say a word and look my disapproval when I hear that my country is spending millions for war and war engines-more, I have heard, than twice as much as the entire public school system costs the nation.

I do not believe that we must maintain a bloated military budget which spends almost as much as the rest of the world combined and may lead us to perpetual warfare in the Middle East.

Global military spending levels constitute an unconscionable use of resources and remain at an all-time high, reaching a total of USD 1.75 trillion in 2012, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

I'm very skeptical of the amount of money that goes into military expenditure, not just in the poor countries [but] also in the rich. I think it's one of the most massive wastes in the world, but education is [at the] other end. It's the bearer of the greatest fruits that mankind has ever known.

If the money wasted on arms could be used to help the less developed nations, that would probably be a greater blow against the Communist danger than anything else.

The sinews of war are infinite money.

Armaments; extremely useful for fighting wars, a deadweight in any civil economy.

The Cold War went on for so long that it bred a kind of worldwide military establishment. Even when budgets went down in the early and mid-nineties, it didn't really affect it.

After Vietnam, the Democrats became fundamentally the anti-military as a party.

We disarm ourselves by making weapons so expensive.

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

We can always find money for what the military wants.

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.

There is no better constraint on the leader of a developing country than telling him that he has to pay cash for his weapons.

No nation, no matter how destitute, likes to be told how much military "security" to buy.

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.

We can cut the Defense Department budget because we’ve got bombs running out of our ears.

When the economies of countries grow, their militaries generally do as well.

Wars cost money.

… war is a matter not so much of arms as of money

Japan is the only country in the world that does not call its defense organizations a military. That is absurd, when the government is spending 5 trillion yen a year for self-defense.

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.

Militarism is the most energy-intensive, entropic activity of humans, since it converts stored energy and materials directly into waste and destruction without any useful intervening fulfillment of basic human needs. Ironically, the net effect of military, as opposed to civilian, expenditures is to increase unemployment and inflation.