Leadership Quote by Barry Goldwater

Cold calculus dressed up as tough-minded honesty: Goldwater’s line doesn’t just concede civilian deaths, it tries to anesthetize the listener to them. The command to “forget about this civilian” is the real payload. It’s a rhetorical pre-emptive strike on moral hesitation, framing concern for noncombatants as naive sentimentality that weakens resolve. Once you accept that premise, the second sentence lands as inevitability: “Whenever you drop bombs, you’re going to hit civilians.” Not a choice, not a failure, not even a tragedy to be minimized - just physics.

The subtext is a bid to reclaim moral clarity by narrowing the definition of morality. War, in this view, is an arena where civilian immunity is an inconvenience civilians should have thought about before living near targets, and policymakers should stop thinking about before making hard calls. It’s also a subtle shift of responsibility: if civilian deaths are guaranteed, then nobody is accountable for them.

Context matters because Goldwater’s political brand was blunt anti-communist hawkishness in the early Cold War, when nuclear strategy and mass bombing sat uneasily beside America’s self-image as a liberator. The line reads like an answer to critics who wanted cleaner wars and more scrupulous rules. Goldwater’s power move is to dismiss the premise altogether: modern air power makes civilian harm not merely likely but structurally baked in, so the moral debate is reclassified as denial.

That’s why it still unsettles. It’s not only describing war’s grim reality; it’s lobbying to make that reality morally boring.