Robert McNamara famous quotes

I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.
-- Robert McNamara

#War #Luck #Important

We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo - men, women and children. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
-- Robert McNamara

#Children #Winning #Men

There are many ways to make the death rate increase.
-- Robert McNamara

#Way #Increase #Rate

If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals.
-- Robert McNamara

#War #Thinking #Criminals

What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
-- Robert McNamara

#Winning #Immoral

We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
-- Robert McNamara

#Shapes #Given #Foreign Policy

Action should be founded on contemplation, and those of us who act don't put enough time, don't give enough emphasis, to contemplation.
-- Robert McNamara

#Giving #Enough Time #Action

General, you don't have a war plan! All you have is a kind of horrible spasm!
-- Robert McNamara

#Peace #War #Kind

Never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you.
-- Robert McNamara

#Wish #Answers

Neither conscience nor sanity itself suggests that the United States is, should or could be the global gendarme.
-- Robert McNamara

#United States #Sanity #Should

I think the human race needs to think about killing. How much evil must we do to do good?
-- Robert McNamara

#Thinking #Race #Evil

They'll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. Make one mistake and you're going to destroy nations.
-- Robert McNamara

#Mistake #Weapons #Nuclear

Let's go in, let's totally destroy Cuba.
-- Robert McNamara

#Cuba

It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives.
-- Robert McNamara

#Nuclear #Use #Weapons

I formed the hypothesis that each of us could have achieved our objectives without the terrible loss of life. And I wanted to test that by going to Vietnam.
-- Robert McNamara

#Loss #Tests #Vietnam

Short of nuclear war itself, population growth is the gravest issue the world faces. If we do not act, the problem will be solved by famine, riots, insurrection and war.
-- Robert McNamara

#War #Issues #Growth

The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.
-- Robert McNamara

#Weapons #Nuclear #Destruction

Measure what is important, don't make important what you can measure
-- Robert McNamara

#Business #Important #Management

We see what we want to believe.
-- Robert McNamara

#Believe #Want

In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil
-- Robert McNamara

#Order #Evil #May

All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal, but with a near infinite capacity for folly. . . . He draws blueprints for Utopia, but never quite gets it built. In the end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand--his own part comic, part tragic, part cussed, but part glorious nature.
-- Robert McNamara

#Animal #Men #Hands

One cannot fashion a credible deterrent out of an incredible action.
-- Robert McNamara

#Fashion #Action #Incredibles

Brains are like hearts - they go where they are appreciated.
-- Robert McNamara

#Leadership #Broken Heart #Brain

That's one of the major lessons: no president should ever take this nation to war without full public debate in the Congress and/or in the public.
-- Robert McNamara

#War #Patriotic #President

Belief and seeing are both often wrong,
-- Robert McNamara

#Belief

All those involved in the firebombing of Tokyo .. were war criminals interviews recorded in the movie The Fog of War.. the firebombing of Tokyo occurred before the atom bombs.. 100,000 civilians died in one night from American bombs.. 500,000 altogether over several days say some.
-- Robert McNamara

#Country #War #Night

Engagement is the conscious inhabitation of your body and mind. Practice is happening when your open awareness is moving with, in and through your embodied activity. Intrinsic to practice is your conscious participation with your life. Engagement is the conduction of your free and open awareness through your activities, whatever they may be.
-- Robert McNamara

#Philosophy #Moving #Practice

I would characterize current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous
-- Robert McNamara

#Inspirational #Weapons #Nuclear

Rationality will not save us.
-- Robert McNamara

#Thinking #Rationality

At my age, 85, I'm at age where I can look back and derive some conclusions about my actions. My rule has been try to learn, try to understand what happened. Develop the lessons and pass them on.
-- Robert McNamara

#War #Age #Trying

It was a perfectly beautiful night, as fall nights are in Washington. I walked out of the president's Oval Office, and as I walked out, I thought I might never live to see another Saturday night.
-- Robert McNamara

#Beautiful #Fall #Night

To this day we seem to act in the world as though we know what's right for everybody.
-- Robert McNamara

#War #Drug #World

One solitary God-centered, God-intoxicated man can do more to keep God's love alive and His presence felt in the world than a thousand half-hearted, talkative busy men living frightened, fragmented lives of quiet desperation.
-- Robert McNamara

#Faith #Inspiration #Men

Management is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused though society.
-- Robert McNamara

#Political #Management #Economic

...but highly placed sources within the Kennedy Administration disagreed: "[T]he assumption that the strategic nuclear balance mattered in any way was wrong... As far as I am concerned, it made no difference... If my memory serves me correctly, we had some five thousand strategic nuclear warheads as against t heir three hundred. Can anyone seriously tell me that their having three hundred and forty would have made any difference? The military balance wasn't changed. I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now..."
-- Robert McNamara

#Memories #Military #Believe

Poor planning or poor execution of plans is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality.
-- Robert McNamara

#Reality #Shapes #Poor Planning

It is true that at the time [1962] we had a strategic nuclear force of approximately five thousand warheads compared to the Soviet's three hundred.
-- Robert McNamara

#Time #Three #Nuclear

Elimination of nuclear weapons, so naive, so simplistic, and so idealistic as to be quixotic? Some may think so. But as human beings, citizens of nations with power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for less? I think not.
-- Robert McNamara

#Thinking #Nuclear #Citizens

The greatest contribution Vietnam is making-right or wrong is beside the point-is that it is developing an ability in the United States to fight a limited war, to go to war without the necessity of arousing the public ire.
-- Robert McNamara

#War #Fighting #Vietnam

A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no particular advantage.
-- Robert McNamara

#Inspiring #Writing #Doe