Donald Rumsfeld

Arguments of convenience lack integrity and inevitably trip you up.

Visit with your predecessors from previous Administrations. They know the ropes and can help you see around some corners. Try to make original mistakes, rather than needlessly repeating theirs.

Look for what’s missing. Many advisors can tell a President how to improve what’s proposed or what’s gone amiss. Few are able to see what isn’t there.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

Don’t do or say things you would not like to see on the front page of The Washington Post.

If the staff lacks policy guidance against which to test decisions, their decisions will be random.

The whole world recognizes Russia’s cultural achievements. It is impossible to imagine the world culture without Russian culture, without our music and literature.

Since its very inception, Israel has been a threat.

I think I’d be a better president because I was in combat.

The centuries-old history and culture of India, majestic architectural monuments and museums of Delhi, Agra and Mumbai have a unique attractive force.

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

Have not fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany claimed that they have attained similar results [as in U.S.S.R.]? Have not both been achieved at the price of privation and personal liberty sacrificed for the good of the state?

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.

Capitalists can buy themselves out of any crisis, so long as they make the workers pay

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

There is not, nor should there be, an irreconcilable contrast between the individual and the collective, between the interests of an individual person and the interests of the collective.

I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.

The depression was just a state of mind. It is over for everyone who has changed his state of mind.

I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics.

…when you look at a television ad, it is not trying to create an informed consumer who’s going to make a rational choice. The purpose is to delude and deceive by imagery — it’s transparent — meaning to ensure that uninformed consumers will make irrational choices.

Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.