Top 50 Pentagon Quotes

I would say that the Pentagon Papers case of 1971 – in which the government tried to block the The New York Times and The Washington Post that they obtained from a secret study of how we got involved in the war in Vietnam – that is probably the most important case.

The Pentagon isn’t a place that champions individuality and innovation.

Hurtling the Pentagon into an unprecedented budgetary meltdown is horrifically irresponsible. Obama doesn’t care. This is war – not against the Taliban, but war against the GOP. He has Republicans on the ropes, and that’s a victory he savors and desires – unlike Afghanistan, where he seems only to want to turn tail.

The Pentagon is a series of wedges. So you have – the outer wedge has windows on the outside, and then inside of that, it has windows with an alleyway; then there’s another wedge with windows outside, windows inside. And we call them the E Ring, the D Ring, the C Ring.

I am confident that President Trump’s administration is capable of making the Pentagon run at maximum efficiency and enacting procurement reforms that will get weapons and assets to our warfighters more quickly and efficiently.

Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) has called for an audit of the Pentagon, so that we finally have some transparency and accountability in how DOD spends taxpayer dollars.

The Pentagon said that these prisoners were kept in accordance with the Geneva Convention, and of course I was not reassured by that, but I couldn’t prove that that was wrong; so we’re clearer about that.

You never know when people with sick minds can destroy your life. It doesn’t matter how well life is going on for you that moment. If that can’t happen in the middle of New York City, it can happen anywhere else. If the terrorists can hit the Pentagon or the White House I don’t see where it’s safe.

I’m a former CIA officer and Pentagon official. I’m a deep believer in border security, but we have to be a nation of moral – of morals and, like, a moral core.

Here at home, when Americans were standing in long lines to give blood after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we squandered an obvious opportunity to make service a noble cause again, and rekindle an American spirit of community.

I had a very normal, very typical American childhood. My father worked for the government at the Pentagon and my mother was an educator, so we had a very average upbringing, but that’s helped me in my writing because I’m writing about ordinary things.

In the Pentagon Papers case, the government asserted in the Supreme Court that the publication of the material was a threat to national security. It turned out it was not a threat to U.S. security. But even if it had been, that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be published.

A war on Al-Qaeda could have been won with a decisive military strike in Tora Bora during December 2001, but American fighters at Tora Bora were refused requests for more forces when they trapped Al-Qaeda there; the Pentagon was busy husbanding resources for the Iraqi invasion.

Let me be crystal clear: There is no such thing as ‘limited use’ nuclear weapons, and for a Pentagon advisory board to promote their development is absolutely unacceptable.

People in the Pentagon had colleagues killed and maimed by bin Laden. They’re trying to find bin Laden and kill him and his cult. Naturally they consider that a legitimate thing to do, but they’re having mixed success at the job.

As long as the Pentagon bankrolls the Pakistan army to fight its wars, and NATO troops remain in Afghanistan, there will be quarrels, charges of infidelity, a reduction in the household allowance, perhaps a separation – but a divorce? Never.

I visited the Pentagon a few days after September 11, and I still remember so vividly the smell of terror surrounding the entire building and complex. I was angry that such a brutal act of violence was committed against innocent people.

I was in the Navy when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked and Flight 93 went down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. I remember the selflessness of our first responders, including brave New Jerseyans, who were there when our country needed them most.

I might be able to high fly when I’m wrestling Pentagon, at the end of the day, Pentagon won that match. At the end of the day, I took 10 package piledrivers, so I don’t really want to do that again.

In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT’s Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!

Bin Laden, who was in his country, attacked and damaged our Pentagon, and killed our soldiers right out here at the Pentagon. But his pentagon no longer exists. It is rubble.

The Pentagon budget, like all government spending, is an expression of priorities.

I remember in the spring of 1971, a hundred thousand people converged on the Pentagon in June of 1971. They threw blood; I guess it was goat’s blood or something, on the steps to the Pentagon. People were being accused of being murderers and baby killers. You just can’t imagine the civic outrage.

We have come to expect campaigns to be mean and stupid and politicians to be unresponsive, self-seeking and for sale to the highest bidder. We make jokes about our vice president, and all we ask of a president is that he be likeable. We seem to have given up on the Pentagon’s corrupt use of our tax dollars.

Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.

The Pentagon today will not allow any of these people who work for the Pentagon, to talk to the media. They have gagged them from talking to members of Congress.

Over my career, I’ve reinvented myself numerous times. I covered the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA. I wrote about labor wars, trade wars and real wars. I chronicled a nuclear plant meltdown and the defeat of Communism. I co-founded a couple of media businesses.

Spending should be transparent. All spending by the Pentagon should be online. Every check. Exceptions should be made for legitimate national security issues. But military and civilian pay and retirement benefits are not state secrets. This has already been done in many state governments.

It would be better for the country if the Pentagon and the military do not shut down at any point because the threats to the country do not shut down.

I served at the Pentagon and at Fort Leavenworth – my job was video cameraman, and that allowed me to travel to places like Korea, Japan, Alaska, Germany and the Netherlands.

Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson’s administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s brilliant ‘whiz kids’ tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.

More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor.

God bless and help all the victims and patriots of 9/11, from the families of Flight 93 passengers to those who were in the Pentagon and Twin Towers as well as others who have fought and presently fight the war on terror.

The Pentagon Papers case stands today as a barrier to silence by official edict.

The days of the Pentagon Papers debates seem long past, when a sudden transparency yielded insight into fights over war and peace and freedom and security; the transparency afforded by Twitter and Facebook yields insights that extend no further than a lawmaker’s boundless narcissism and a culture’s pitiless prurience.

The most important thing you need to know about the Pentagon is that it is not in charge of today’s wars but rather tomorrow’s wars.

What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It’s their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology.

Osama bin Laden’s hijacked planes not only attacked the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They also attacked Islam as a faith. They attacked the values of tolerance and coexistence that Islam preaches.

As the Pentagon makes plans for the largest troop rotation since World War II, I will work with the Armed Services Committee to help make this proposal a reality.

During the cold war, it was easy for the Pentagon to justify its budget, as the Soviets essentially sized our forces for us. We simply counted up their stuff and either bought more of the same or upgraded our technology.

Well, it is true that they did – the Pentagon did impose rules for governing the handling of the Koran in January of 2003, after there had been complaints about the handling of the Koran from detainees, from the International Red Cross.

During my 20 years as a Marine, I served three combat tours and as a Congressional Fellow advising a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee on defense and foreign policy. I went on to serve in the Pentagon as Marine Corps’ liaison to the State Department.

The aircraft that blew up the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington conveyed several messages to the world, of which one of the least remarked is this: the Muslims of the world are suffering.

Let’s push the Pentagon off the fiscal cliff.

I will never forget the bright September day, standing at my desk in the White House, when my young assistant said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center – and then a second one – and a third, the Pentagon.

The Pentagon should use data to guide financial decision-making.

Writers are not obliged to deal with current events, but it happens that the big story of our times – the al-Qaida attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – is being told in some of the greatest books of our time.

My dad was stationed at the Pentagon when I was like middle-school age. He was support for the Joint Chiefs of Staff; his boss was Colin Powell.

I was a part of the decision-making in the Pentagon, when I was the undersecretary for intelligence, to start CYBERCOM, both as a sub-unified command and under a dual-hat arrangement. That was never intended to be permanent in any event.

I certainly know that this relationship could not have continued the way it did, when I was at the Pentagon and the president was obviously at the White House, without Betty.