Bernie Sanders Quotes

A little tough talk in the midst of a campaign or as part of a presidential debate cannot obscure a record of 30 years of being on the wrong side of defense issues.

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

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

You're not hearing people like Madeleine Albright argue that the budget of the State Department should be as large as the Defense Department. The Pentagon is going to be larger by its nature. It's going to have more people.

I think it's encouraging that President Trump is talking about strengthening our national defense, something he ran on again.

The No. 1 purpose of the federal government is national defense.

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.

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.

Bill Clinton kept funding Star Wars. He took the biggest military budget to Congress in history. He routinely bombed Iraq, and he kept the barbaric sanctions in place. He's really played his part. The George W. Bush gang has taken it just a little further.

Militarism is in direct competition with people's needs for food, health care, and environmental protection.

Bottom line: A market approach to national defense would give us a lousy national defense.

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.

I've had this underlying need to go to a place and meet people who are on the other end of the portion of my tax money that goes to fund the U.S. and other militaries.

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.

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

The mainstream of both the Republican and Democratic Parties are equally committed to militarism today.

The world has nothing to fear from military ambition in our Government

I have long maintained the military budget is not a jobs bill... and will continue to support the lowest budget possible.

We had eight years of Barack Obama depleting our military, ignoring a lot of the threats around the world.

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.

If somewhere is a deficiency the normal American answer would have been well then, let's spend some more money, build some more weapons and deploy them. That's the normal way of thinking of the military, in America not only but also all over the place, but America or Russia or other countries.

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.

World military spending has now risen to over $1.2 trillion. This incredible sum represents 2.5 per cent of GDP (global gross domestic product). Even if 1 per cent of it were redirected towards development, the world would be much closer to achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

I suspect that Donald Trump is going to be very tough with those countries that don't spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense. He will ask them why should we allow a free-ride policy.