Henry M. Jackson - Quotes

Quotes

• "In matters of national security, the best politics is no politics."
• "I'm not a hawk or a dove. I just don't want my country to be a pigeon."
• "If you believe in the cause of freedom, then proclaim it, live it and protect it, for humanity's future depends on it."
• "The richest country in the world can afford whatever it needs for defense." (1960, campaigning for Kennedy)
• "We all want to put the brakes on the arms race...we all want to achieve arms control...but to those who say we must take risks for peace by cutting the meat from our military muscle, I say you are unwittingly risking war."
• "When we have something we feel strongly about — and in this case it is civil liberties and freedom and what this nation was founded upon, that we should do something to implement international law — and it is international law now, the right to leave a country freely and return freely — that we should put that issue of principle on the table knowing that the Russians are not going to agree to it." (1974, opposing détente)
• "I believe that international terrorism is a modern form of warfare against liberal democracies. I believe that the ultimate but seldom stated goal of these terrorists is to destroy the very fabric of democracy. I believe that it is both wrong and foolhardy for any democratic state to consider international terrorism to be 'someone else's' problem.... Liberal democracies must acknowledge that international terrorism is a 'collective problem.'" (1979, Jerusalem)
• "The danger of Americans being killed, the danger of divisiveness that would accrue from those developments ... are all too real. A superpower should not play that kind of role in a cauldron of trouble, because sooner or later we are going to get hurt." (on Reagan's 1982 decision to send troops to Lebanon)