Donald Rumsfeld

Our task, your task… is to try to connect the dots before something happens. People say, ‘Well, where’s the smoking gun?’ Well, we don’t want to see a smoking gun from a weapon of mass destruction.

Reduce the layers of management. They put distance between the top of an organization and the customers.

Congress, the press, and the bureaucracy too often focus on how much money or effort is spent, rather than whether the money or effort actually achieves the announced goal.

In the execution of Presidential decisions work to be true to his views, in fact and tone.

I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks or five months, but it won’t last any longer than that.

Be yourself. Follow your instincts. Success depends, at least in part, on the ability to carry it off.

I was down there, and I watched our police and our firemen, down on 7-11, down at the World Trade Center, right after it came down

I think that the centralisation of access to information through the few major corporations that by now virtually monopolise information transmission, like Facebook, Google, Amazon, is extremely dangerous.

We could only solve our problems by cooperating with other countries. It would have been paradoxical not to cooperate. And therefore we needed to put an end to the Iron Curtain, to change the nature of international relations, to rid them of ideological confrontation, and particularly to end the arms race.

A basic principle of modern state capitalism is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized.

Trumpism is one of many manifestations of the effects of the neoliberal policies of the past generation. These have led to extreme concentration of wealth along with stagnation for the majority.

While Trump’s antics occupy the attention of the media, his associates in Congress have been working intensively to advance the interests of their actual constituency-extreme wealth and corporate power-while dismantling what is of value to the general population andfuture generations.

I’m not trying to get myself up a notch on the ladder by shoving somebody else down on the ladder, whether it’s a candidate or the president of the United States or anybody else. I just don’t believe that’s the way one oughta campaign, I’ve never done that.

Changing the big picture takes time.. and the best things to do is focus on the things that we can make in our lives if we’re doing all that. That becomes the collage of real change.

From the beginning, we failed to overcome Europe’s division. The Berlin Wall fell, but invisible walls were moved to the East of Europe. This has led to mutual misunderstandings and assignments of guilt. They are the cause of all crises ever since.

There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy.

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.

Public officials are all right if they stay in their proper sphere and perform their proper functions but when they get greedy for wider scope and more power and money they lose their value and become parasites.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me. I mean, there are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‘That person I see is a savage monster’; instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do. If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the effect of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and you see the reality is something far different.

Israel is…seeking to expand its base of support to the East, primarily to China and India, the latter becoming a very natural ally for a number of reasons, including the drift in both societies toward ultranationalism, reactionary internal policies and hatred of Islam.

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.