Robert McNamara

“Belief and seeing are both often wrong.”

“We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.”

“Any military commander who is honest with himself, or with those he's speaking to, will admit that he has made mistakes in the application of military power.”

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

“In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.”

“The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.”

“Get the data.”

“If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”

“Lesson number one: Empathize with your enemy.”

“What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”

“We are the strongest nation in the world, but we are not omnipotent.”

“There is no learning period for a President.”

“We see what we want to believe.”

“Rationality will not save us.”

“Proportionality should be a guideline in war.”

“I think the human race needs to think about killing. How much killing can we do?”

“We have to find a way to deal with the 21st-century world. We can't do it with a 19th-century mentality.”

“I'm not so naive as to believe that we can eliminate war. We're not going to change human nature.”