Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm a big advocate of drones.
I consider myself a Republican.
Things have gotten so nasty in Washington.
Defense is not like other discretionary spending.
Development is a lot cheaper than sending soldiers.
Health care costs are eating the Defense Department alive.
I have always voted for who I believed was the best person.
Most governments lie to each other. That's the way business gets done.
The United States has been a global power since late in the 19th century.
I don't think any president that I worked with has ever said 'pretty please.
I don't think any president that I worked with has ever said 'pretty please.'
One of the toughest battles in intelligence is combating conventional wisdom.
There will be boots on the ground if there's to be any hope of success in the strategy.
A wild and crazy weekend involves sitting on the front porch, smoking a cigar, reading a book.
One of my favorite little sayings is, 'To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.
One of my favorite little sayings is, 'To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.'
Well, Israel, obviously, thinks of the Iranian nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel.
Congress is best viewed from a distance - the farther the better - because up close, it is truly ugly.
I wish I could set deadlines for the Congress, but that's just not the way the Constitution is written.
Well, I've ruffled a few feathers at all the institutions I've led. But I think that's part of leadership.
I will always be an advocate in terms of wars of necessity. I am just much more cautious on wars of choice.
I had no difficulty as Secretary of Defense moving from the Bush administration to the Obama administration.
No president is well-served by groupthink or by everybody singing from the same sheet of music they think he's on.
What I know concerns me. What I don't know concerns me even more. What people aren't telling me worries me the most.
If there's ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience.
America's civilian institutions of diplomacy and development have been chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long.
You know, if I were an - if I were a Taliban, I'd say, 'What did al-Qaida ever do for me except get me kicked out of Afghanistan?'
I think that Iran with a nuclear weapon is extremely destabilizing. I think it could precipitate a nuclear arms race in the region.
I have tried to maintain civil relationships with everyone I meet - and, even if I violently disagree with them, try to be respectful.
And so the greatest of American triumphs... became a peculiarly joyless victory. We had won the Cold War, but there would be no parades.
I read in the press, and therefore it must be true, that no secretary of defense had ever been quoted as arguing for a bigger budget for State.
There's a lot of books out there about how you lead change in business, but I've certainly not seen any... on how you do that in public institutions.
I think Donald Trump has gotten China's attention to a degree that his predecessors have not that this is a very serious matter for the United States.
I've been very sensitive for a long time to the repeated pattern, during economic hard times or after a war, of the United States' essentially unilaterally disarming.
It's a very broad and not very well-disguised effort of Russians to create questions about the legitimacy of these Western elections. And, I think, this is very K.G.B.
I've seen, all too often in my career, people coming in to lead agencies and organizations and trying to impose change from the top down. Never works. You never have enough time.
No policy has proved more successful in making friends for the United States, during the cold war and since, than educating students from abroad at our colleges and universities.
Some people have said, in so many words, that I'm kind of wooly-headed in believing that the Iranians would see not having nuclear weapons as more in their security interest than not.
The reality is, the United States has global interests. Our defense budget is about the same as the defense budgets or military budgets of every other country in the world put together.
I had no concerns - I had no reason to have concerns based on what was available to me about North's contacts with the private sector people, but I didn't think a CIA person should do it.
When I was the director of Central Intelligence in the early '90s, I tried to get the Air Force to partner with us in building drones. And they didn't want to, because they had no pilots.
Well, what I've said is that the war in Iraq will always be clouded by how it began, which was a wrong premise, that there were in fact no weapons of nuclear - weapons of mass destruction.
Future U.S. political leaders – those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me – may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.
Even when I was at CIA, I'd go to visit foreign leaders and I'd say, 'You know, I'm not a diplomat. I'm just an old CIA guy'... I said, 'If I wanted to be diplomatic, I'd have been a diplomat.'
I think that - that the disruptive nature, the tough talk on North Korea, the military deployments, sending the missile defense system to South Korea, I think these are all good things to have done.
I think, on the foreign policy side, that there is a need for disruption. We've had three administrations follow a pretty consistent policy toward North Korea, and it really hasn't gotten us anywhere.
If Poindexter made a comment to me like that, it would have been in the context of once the authorized program is approved there would be no point in having any of these private benefactors any longer.
In government, I'm a strong believer in the need for reform of government agencies and departments. They - they have gotten fat and sloppy, and they're not user friendly. They are inefficient. They cost too much.
We should never lose sight of the ethos that has made the Marine Corps - where 'every Marine is a rifleman' - one of America's cherished institutions and one of the world's most feared and respected fighting forces
On the foreign policy side, there's the risk of being too spontaneous and too disruptive where you end up doing more harm than damage. And figuring out that balance is where having strong people around you matters.