Robert McNamara Quotes

Robert McNamara offers plain-spoken insight on how management steers society's big shifts.

13 quotes

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

2. 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.

3. [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?

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

5. 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.

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

7. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I'd rather be damned if I don't.

8. 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.

9. Lesson 2: The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.

10. 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?

11. Let's go in, let's totally destroy Cuba.

12. In my seven years as Secretary, we came within a hair's breadth of war with the Soviet Union on three different occasions! Twenty-four hours a day, three-hundred sixty-five days a year, for seven years as Secretary of Defense, I lived the Cold War! During the Kennedy Administration, they designed a one-hundred Megaton bomb! It was tested in the atmosphere; I remember this.

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