Donald Rumsfeld

The Secretary of Defense is not a super General or Admiral. His task is to exercise civilian control over the Department for the Commander-in-Chief and the country.

You will launch many projects, but have time to finish only a few. So think, plan, develop, launch and tap good people to be responsible. Give them authority and hold them accountable. Trying to do too much yourself creates a bottleneck.

It isn’t making mistakes that’s critical; it’s correcting them and getting on with the principal task.

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

If you foul up, tell the President and correct it fast. Delay only compounds mistakes.

Remember where you came from.

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.

For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

Today is Trinity Sunday. Centuries ago words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of Truth and Justice: Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valor, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the Will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be.

Excess in Apparel is another costly Folly. The very Trimming of the vain World would cloath all the naked one.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it but I couldnt find honest employment.

Don’t learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world.

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

There can be no friendship where there is no freedom. Friendship loves a free air, and will not be fenced up in straight and narrow enclosures.

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

Rebellions of the belly are the worst.

When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights…sexual intercourse!…His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.