Donald Rumsfeld

Preserve the President’s options. He may need them.

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

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

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.

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.

If in doubt, move decisions up to the President.

Anarcho-syndicalism took for granted that working people ought to control their own work, its conditions, that they ought to control the enterprises in which they work, along with communities, so they should be associated with one another in free associations…

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.

The United States has overstepped its borders in all spheres – economic, political and humanitarian – and has imposed itself on other states.

Debate cannot be stilled, and indeed, in a properly functioning system of propaganda, it should not be, because it has a system-reinforcing character if constrained within proper bounds. What is essential is to set the bounds firmly.

It is because Russia is seen as a threat, because Russia is seen as becoming a competitor. I believe this approach is mistaken.

It is quite possible-overwhelmingly probable, one might guess-that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology

If we do not believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we do not believe in it at all.

The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.

It is necessary to suppress any extremist actions, on all sides, regardless of their origin.

Nationalizing the whole oil sector would be a difficult and highly dangerous process, which could have negative consequences not only for the sector but for the whole economy.

In a three-minute stretch between commercials, or in seven hundred words, it is impossible to present unfamiliar thoughts or surprising conclusions with the argument and evidence required to afford them some credibility. Regurgitation of welcome pieties faces no such problem.

What I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first.

The option preferred by the privileged is for the fate of everyone else to be in the hands of insurance company executives whose goal, as Milton Friedman can explain, is to ensure maximum profit and market share: meaning the worst possible health care.

There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea. Absolutely.

You should never be so high and mighty you can’t listen to somebody else and learn something from them. Leadership is as much about using the ear as using the mouth.