Donald Rumsfeld

Enjoy your time in public service. It may well be one of the most interesting and challenging times of your life.

Test ideas in the marketplace. You learn from hearing a range of perspectives. Consultation helps engender the support decisions need to be successfully implemented.

One of your tasks is to separate the “personal” from the “substantive.” The two can become confused, especially if someone rubs the President wrong.

Success tends to go not to the person who is error-free, because he also tends to be risk-averse. Rather it goes to the person who recognizes that life is pretty much a percentage business. It isn’t making mistakes that’s critical; it’s correcting them and getting on with the principal task.

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

If in doubt, don’t. If still in doubt, do what’s right.

Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

You will know (the good from the bad) when you are calm, at peace. Passive.

Froth at the top, dregs at bottom, but the middle excellent.

You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life — some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed — because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this defense against passionate affliction even more than men.

To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right.

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

They are decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.

And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values, like you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond; that you do what you say you’re going to do. That you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them and even if you don’t agree with them.

The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.

He that pursues fame with just claims, trusts his happiness to the winds; but he that endeavors after it by false merit, has to fear, not only the violence of the storm, but the leaks of his vessel.

Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

They that deny a God destroy man’s nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and, if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.