Lemay Quotes & Sayings

We should bomb Vietnam back into the stone age. — Curtis LeMay

If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting. — Curtis LeMay

A very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe [war]. I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or other that crops up. These people would not be able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity ... and therefore I think that it's, in some sense, the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who share a very serious burden of guilt that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and violent. — Noam Chomsky

That's the reason some schools of thinking don't rule out a destruction of the Chinese military potential before the situation grows worse than it is today. It's bad enough now. — Curtis LeMay

Why is it a man can never seem to buckle down and train himself to indolence and stupidity when he can see what sanctuary they offer from toil and pain? — Alan LeMay

How to recognize what is real? To know the layers and depths of oneself, to know how to open, to know how to fill a capacious hold-all, to know one's own quirks and nervous twitches, cravings and transparencies, and, above all the force, literally the force, of events, connections, the wild calm in every thing. — Shawna Lemay

... No one ever truly conquers the French. — Vivian LeMay

I think there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons. However, the public opinion in this country and throughout the world throw up their hands in horror when you mention nuclear weapons, just because of the propaganda that's been fed to them. — Curtis LeMay

If we maintain our faith in God, love of freedom, and superior global air power, the future looks good. — Curtis LeMay

You [President Kennedy] have made some pretty strong statements about their being defensive and that we would take action against offensive weapons. I think that a blockade and political talk would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this [the Cuban missile crisis]. And I'm sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way too. In other words, you're in a pretty bad fix at the present time. — Curtis LeMay

We're going to bomb them back into the stone Age. — Curtis LeMay

There is a great independence, and a confident immunity to risk, in all drinks made out of cactus. — Alan LeMay

I don't have time to distinguish between the unfortunate and the incompetent. — Curtis LeMay

It still, after all these years, puts frost into my blood to remember that men like LeMay and Powers had their fingers so close to the button. — Mal Peet

That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it. — Curtis LeMay

Today, shooting wars are won or lost before they start. If they are fought at all, they would be fought principally to confirm which side had won at the outset. — Curtis LeMay

We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too ... Over a period of three years or so, we killed off - what - twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure? — Curtis LeMay

My solution to the problem would be to tell the North Vietnamese Communists frankly that they've got to drawn in their horns and stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them into the stone age. — Curtis LeMay

According to Japanese scholar Yuki Tanaka, the United States firebombed over a hundred Japanese cities. Destruction reached 99.5 percent in the city of Toyama, driving Secretary of War Henry Stimson to tell Truman he "did not want to have the US get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities," though Stimson did almost nothing to halt the slaughter. He had managed to delude himself into believing Arnold's promise that he would limit "damage to civilians." Future Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who was on LeMay's staff in 1945, agreed with his boss's comment that of the United States lost the war, they'd all be tried as war criminals and deserved to be convicted.
Hatred towards the Japanese ran so deep that almost no one objected to the mass slaughter of civilians. — Oliver Stone

I'd like to see a more aggressive attitude on the part of the United States. That doesn't mean launching an immediate preventive war ... — Curtis LeMay

You've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting. — Curtis LeMay

If you are going to use military force, then you ought to use overwhelming military force. Use too much and deliberately use too much; you'll save lives, not only your own, but the enemy's too. — Curtis LeMay

We're at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed? — Curtis LeMay

I don't want to hear of any of you men getting into any fights with the British. But if you do, you'd better not get whipped. — Curtis LeMay

Yet I never sought what is real, yearned for the real, but rather I have yearned for dreams more than solid things. I can say I love the textures of dreams. The way they hover and almost taste. The clouds and darkness that linger behind, mostly unseen. And the palette of dreams. You can almost taste the colours, they seem as words on the tip of the tongue, unsayable as pomegranate seeds, unsayable as thick cream, the darkness of such a thick cream. This is why I am obsessed with dreams. They know what we cannot. Night after night they try and tell us the impossible. Dreams are secret and closed, and also contain everything, gushing, splayed open. Dream suitcases, carpetbags, hold-alls. They influence us secretly and they draw me to travel to nowhere, to beauty's passage, through halls of mirrors where I know I am not myself, I know I am sublime. — Shawna Lemay

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

Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time ... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. — Curtis LeMay

Sometime in the future - 25, 50, 75 years hence - what will the situation be like then? By that time the Chinese will have the capability of delivery too. — Curtis LeMay

I don't mind being called tough, since I find in this racket it's the tough guys who lead the survivors. — Curtis LeMay

Don't like to do anything half-heartedly, even if it is a wicked and self-destructive avocation like smoking cigars — Curtis LeMay

I pastiche, I quote, I lie. Fake, forge, forage, fabricate, copy, borrow, transform, steal. I illusion. I'm a genuine deceiver, a shy sham artist. — Shawna Lemay

There are no innocent civilians, so it doesn't bother me so much to be killing innocent bystanders. — Curtis LeMay