Donald Rumsfeld

Don’t blame the boss. He has enough problems.

Be able to resign. It will improve your value to the President and do wonders for your performance.

Be precise. A lack of precision is dangerous when the margin of error is small.

If you try to please everybody, somebody’s not going to like it.

With the press there is no ‘off the record’.

Think ahead. Don’t let day-to-day operations drive out planning.

We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.

Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.

Do what we can, summer will have its flies.

There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.

Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance.

The joys of parents are secret, and so are their grieves and fears.

Why is that others have so much faith in me, while I have so little? Why can’t I have the same belief in me that they have? Why can’t I see in myself, what they do? What is it that makes me, hold myself back? How many more hurdles do I need to overcome? There are so many questions that I have to find the answers to. And I will only find them by focusing and being completely honest with myself.

One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning’s greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.

The revelation of Thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

In fine, he that is drunk is not a Man: Because he is so long void of Reason, that distinguishes a Man from a Beast.