The spirit of this country is totally adverse to a large military force.
Thomas Jefferson

Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation - not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago.
Barack Obama

Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terrorism have reduced the pace of military transformation and have revealed our lack of preparation for defensive and stability operations. This Administration has overextended our military.
Barack Obama

We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.
Barack Obama

We're in greater danger today than we were the day after Pearl Harbor. Our military is absolutely incapable of defending this country.
Ronald Reagan

For good or for ill, air mastery is today the supreme expression of military power and fleets and armies, however vital and important, must accept a subordinate rank.
Winston Churchill

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

A young man who does not have what it takes to perform military service is not likely to have what it takes to make a living. Today's military rejects include tomorrow's hard-core unemployed.
John F. Kennedy

The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution.
John F. Kennedy

I look forward to a great future for America - a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.
John F. Kennedy

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
Groucho Marx

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Groucho Marx

Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.
George Washington

A piece of spaghetti or a military unit can only be led from the front end.
George S. Patton

I have against me the bourgeois, the military and the diplomats, and for me, only the people who take the Metro.
Charles de Gaulle

I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.
Niccolo Machiavelli

And like the old soldier in that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the sight to see that duty.
Douglas MacArthur

Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.
Douglas MacArthur

I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone.
William Faulkner