Robert McNamara Quotes
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Measure what is important, don't make important what you can measure
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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.
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I think the human race needs to think about killing. How much evil must we do to do good?
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One cannot fashion a credible deterrent out of an incredible action.
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Management is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused though society.
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To this day we seem to act in the world as though we know what's right for everybody.
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General, you don't have a war plan! All you have is a kind of horrible spasm!
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Poor planning or poor execution of plans is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality.
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Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
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There is no more important task in a democracy than resolving the differences among people and finding a course of action that will be supported by a sufficient number to permit the nation to achieve a better life for all.
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They'll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. Make one mistake and you're going to destroy nations.
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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.
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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.
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There are many ways to make the death rate increase.
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[General Curtis] LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side has lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
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Action should be founded on contemplation, and those of us who act don't put enough time, don't give enough emphasis, to contemplation.
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Brains are like hearts - they go where they are appreciated.
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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.
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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.
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I don't object to its being called "McNamara's war." I think it is a very important war and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it.
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One must take draconian measures of demographic reduction against the will of the populations. Reducing the birth rate has proved to be impossible or insufficient. One must therefore increase the mortality rate. How? By natural means. Famine and sickness
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It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives.
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I like to run down to the beach and have a little swim in the nude in the morning.
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The 'realist' conception of continuing old-fashioned 'balance of power' politics may have been well founded in the past, but it is inconsistent with our increasing interdependent world. On moral grounds alone there can be no justification for the 20th century level of killing. To settle disputes without violence must become the primary goal of foreign policy for every nation.
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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.
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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.
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In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil
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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.
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What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
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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.
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Robert McNamara
- Born: June 9, 1916
- Died: July 6, 2009
- Occupation: Former United States Secretary of Defense
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