Blowback Quotes

The challenge that worries us most comes from within, from within the People’s Republic of China and from within our own party…. I’ve said there’ll be no end to this, because if there’s a backlash, there’ll be big problems

Politics follows the lines of physics: every action creates an equal and opposite reaction.

The stone often recoils on the head of the thrower.

...all wars eventually act as boomerangs and the victor suffers as much as the vanquished

'Blowback,' as many 'Nation' readers are aware, was a term introduced into popular circulation by the late political scientist Chalmers Johnson, an old Cold Warrior turned dissident.

We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.

As the blowback against those who stand up for what is right thickens, I feel it is necessary to push forward with a relentless determination.

I am not a 'defender' of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned.

In the years since 9/11, more terrorists have been created through this President's policies than were captured or killed. There weren't any terrorists in Iraq in 2003, but there are now.

The term blowback, which officials of the Central Intelligent Agency first invented for their own internal use, . . . refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign act of terrorists or drug lords or rogue states or illegal arms merchants often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.

… in the future, dozens of governments—acquire these weapons [WMDs], it may be only a matter of time before madness, desperation, greed or miscalculation lets loose the terrible force..

The Americans sowed the seed, and now they have reaped the whirlwind

If U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned.

Inevitably, these sorts of things are going to come back to blow up in people's faces.

I came to the conclusion that there was some sort of conspiracy, probably involving the mob, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, and maybe rogue CIA agents.

I want to tell you, [Justice Neil] Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price, You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.

Now, they will have to find the assassin quickly, but very quickly, otherwise, you watch and see, I know them, they will try to put the blame on us for this thing.

Secret ops by secret forces have a nasty tendency to produce unintended, unforeseen, and completely disastrous consequences. New Yorkers will remember well the end result of clandestine U.S. support for Islamic militants against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s: 9/11.

Every time we have toppled a secular dictator (in the Middle East), it has been replaced by a chaos and the rise of radical Islam…. Intervention has unintended consequences

It's like you can't even go on the radio anymore and condemn a whole subset of people to hell without getting some blowback.

We try to show that violence has a consequence - when you create violence, it turns against you.

I will not sleep fine if Donald Trump wins and I will not sleep fine is Hillary Clinton wins. Whether you are looking at nuclear weapons, whether you are looking at expanding wars and their blowback, which will not stop as long as those wars continue to expand, or whether you're looking at the climate, in my view, we have no choice. This is an existential moment. We are deciding not only what kind of world we will have, but whether we will have a world or not. I think it's very important to get outside this box that tells us we are powerless, when in fact, we are powerful.

Blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows.

Without a clear picture of where the military's covert forces are operating and what they are doing, Americans may not even recognize the consequences of and blowback from our expanding secret wars as they wash over the world.

The stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yard! America's chickens are coming home to roost!