John Doolittle Quotes

What I've learned, and will try to remember from now on, is that defending your country's credibility is never sufficient reason to fight a war.

People have a very political way of looking at war, and that's understandable.

It is not uncommon in modern times to see governments straining every nerve to keep the peace, and the people whom they represent, with patriotic enthusiasm and resentment over real or fancied wrongs, urging them forward to war.

Like any other people, like fathers, mothers, sons and daughters in every land, when the issue of peace or war has been put squarely to the American people, they have registered for peace.

What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.

We have to make sure that we are a force for peace and stability in the world, and that we're prepared to defend freedom and the security of the American people.

People who start wars never know exactly how they will turn out.

The only alternative is war or national dishonor; and between these two, what American can hesitate.

When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its efforts that their utterance will not be endured.

By invading Iraq, the President has undermined the War on Terrorism.

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.

I don’t have a problem going after people who want to attack this country

What the American people want to do is fight a war without getting hurt. You can't do that any more than you can get into a barroom fight without getting hurt... Unless the American people are willing to send their sons out to fight an aggressor, there just isn't going to be any United States.

War is much too serious a thing to be left to military men.

War as Napoleon knew it just not possible any more. However, we're very unlikely to accept or recognize 'world peace' even when we get it.

This war of choice in Iraq is undermining the very fabric of American society.

Wars are, of course, as a rule to be avoided; but they are far better than certain kinds of peace.

So a truthful assessment of how America is doing in the war on terror as a result of President Bush's war on Iraq is that we have been set back by decades.

We wanted this war and now we've got it, and I'm not sure that we know what to do with it.

War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world's first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions.

The Iraq War was the biggest issue for people of my generation in the West. It was also the clearest case, in my living memory, of media manipulation and the creation of a war through ignorance.

I think it's in the hands of each head of state: the future of peace in his own country.

I said in my heart that, rather than have war, I would give up my country.

I do not believe, given her past decisions and comments on the reasons to go to war in Iraq, that Dr. Rice will be able to represent the United States without a predetermined bias from the war.