Top 35 Robert McNamara Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Measure what is important, don’t make important what you can measure.”

— Robert McNamara

Featured in: Decision-Making Quotes, Statistics Quotes

2. “Brains are like hearts – they go where they are appreciated.”

— Robert McNamara

3. “We see what we want to believe.”

— Robert McNamara

4. “Poor planning or poor execution of plans is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality.”

— Robert McNamara

5. “One must take draconian measures of demographic reduction against the will of the populations. Reducing the birth rate has proved to be impossible or insufficient. One must therefore increase the mortality rate. How? By natural means. Famine and sickness.”

— Robert McNamara

6. “Never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you.”

— Robert McNamara

7. “Rationality will not save us.”

— Robert McNamara

8. “Short of nuclear war itself, population growth is the gravest issue the world faces. If we do not act, the problem will be solved by famine, riots, insurrection and war.”

— Robert McNamara

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

— Robert McNamara

10. “The war in Vietnam is going well and will succeed.”

— Robert McNamara

11. “I think the human race needs to think about killing. How much evil must we do to do good?”

— Robert McNamara

12. “There are many ways to make the death rate increase.”

— Robert McNamara

13. “I like to run down to the beach and have a little swim in the nude in the morning.”

— Robert McNamara

14. “I don’t object to its being called “McNamara’s war.” I think it is a very important war and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it.”

— Robert McNamara

15. “The greatest contribution Vietnam is making-right or wrong is beside the point-is that it is developing an ability in the United States to fight a limited war, to go to war without the necessity of arousing the public ire.”

— Robert McNamara

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

— Robert McNamara

17. “We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.”

— Robert McNamara

18. “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals.”

— Robert McNamara

19. “One solitary God-centered, God-intoxicated man can do more to keep God’s love alive and His presence felt in the world than a thousand half-hearted, talkative busy men living frightened, fragmented lives of quiet desperation.”

— Robert McNamara

20. “Let’s go in, let’s totally destroy Cuba.”

— Robert McNamara

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

— Robert McNamara

22. “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?”

— Robert McNamara

23. “At my age, 85, I’m at age where I can look back and derive some conclusions about my actions. My rule has been try to learn, try to understand what happened. Develop the lessons and pass them on.”

— Robert McNamara

24. “They’ll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. Make one mistake and you’re going to destroy nations.”

— Robert McNamara

25. “Action should be founded on contemplation, and those of us who act don’t put enough time, don’t give enough emphasis, to contemplation.”

— Robert McNamara

26. “Elimination of nuclear weapons, so naive, so simplistic, and so idealistic as to be quixotic? Some may think so. But as human beings, citizens of nations with power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for less? I think not.”

— Robert McNamara

27. “I formed the hypothesis that each of us could have achieved our objectives without the terrible loss of life. And I wanted to test that by going to Vietnam.”

— Robert McNamara

28. “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.”

— Robert McNamara

29. “I would characterize current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous.”

— Robert McNamara

30. “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.”

— Robert McNamara

31. “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”

— Robert McNamara

32. “General, you don’t have a war plan! All you have is a kind of horrible spasm!”

— Robert McNamara

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

— Robert McNamara

34. “A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no particular advantage.”

— Robert McNamara

35. “One cannot fashion a credible deterrent out of an incredible action.”

— Robert McNamara

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

— Robert McNamara

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

— Robert McNamara

38. “To this day we seem to act in the world as though we know what’s right for everybody.”

— Robert McNamara