Quotes from Robert A. Taft

Lending war equipment is a good deal like lending chewing gum. You don't want it back.

T]he forcing of any special brand of freedom and democracy on a people, whether they want it or not, by the brute force of war will be a denial of those very democratic principles which we are striving to advance.

For no one makes aggresive war unless he excepts to win

Power without foresight leads to disaster.

War, undertaken for even justifiable purposes, has often had the principal results of wrecking the country intended to be saved and spreading death and destruction among an innocent civilian population. War should never be undertaken or seriously risked except to protect American liberty.

We cannot adopt a foreign policy which gives away all of our people's earnings or imposes such a tremendous burden on the individual American as, in effect, to destroy his incentive and his ability to increase production and productivity and his standard of living. We cannot assume a financial burden in our foreign policy so great that it threatens liberty at home.

I do not think this moral leadership ideal justifies our engaging in any preventive war, or going to the defense of one country against another, or getting ourselves into a vulnerable fiscal and economic position at home which may invite war. I do not believe any policy which has behind it the threat of military force is justified as part of the basic foreign policy of the United States except to defend the liberty of our own people.

No foreign policy can be justified except a policy devoted without reservation or diversion to the protection of liberty of the American people, with war only as the last resort and only to preserve that liberty.

True freedom depends on local self-government, effective access of the people to their individual rights. Sometimes I question whether the United States has not reached the limit of size under which the people of a nation can have a real voice in its government.

The truth is that no nation can be constantly prepared to undertake a full-scale war at any moment and still hope to maintain any of the other purposes in which people are interested and for which nations are founded.

An unwise and overambitious foreign policy, and particularly the effort to do more than we are able to do, is the one thing which might in the end destroy our armies and prove a real threat to the liberty of the people of the United States.

For no one makes aggresive war unless he excepts to win