Donald Rumsfeld

Arguments of convenience lack integrity and inevitably trip you up.

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

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.

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.

Reduce the layers of management. They put distance between the top of an organization and the customers.

The Federal Government should be the last resort, not the first. Ask if a potential program is truly a federal responsibility or whether it can better be handled privately, by voluntary organizations, or by local or state governments.

There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy.

Based on our preliminary calculations, we may in the next six years spend 17 trillion roubles (Putin said billion, but meant trillion), but to achieve the goals that we have discussed, we will need an additional 8 trillion roubles. And it is clear where we are going to find them.

According to polls released by the Brookings Institution in August [2011], some Arabs agree with Washington and western commentators that Iran is a threat: 10%. In contrast, they regard the US and Israel as the major threats (77%; 88%).

Medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism.

There’s plenty to criticize about the mass media, but they are the source of regular information about a wide range of topics. You can’t duplicate that on blogs.

In 1995, Russia virtually gave Chechnya de facto statehood and independence even though, de jure, it didn’t recognize Chechnya as an independent state. And I would like to emphasize strongly that Russia withdrew all of its troops, we moved the prosecutors, we moved all the police, dismantled all the courts, completely, 100 percent.

The word terrorism has a meaning, it is defined in the US and international law and so on. But that’s not the definition we are allowed to use. We use the word terrorism in a way which means there’s terrorism against us but not our terrorism against them. That’s not terrorism. So for example, if we use the word “terrorism” in its litteral meaning, the most extreme terrorist operation in the world today would be Obama’s global assassination campaign, the drone campaign

It’s been fascinating – and exhilarating – watching this movement mushroom over the last few weeks, this campaign is about spreading a message of hope and change based on the central choice – five years or more of continued austerity, or a plan for investment and growth that stands up for the majority.

Look, freedom is an overwhelming American notion. The idea that we want to see the world, the peoples of the world free is something that all of us subscribe to.

Well take, say a corporate executive By law, a corporate executive must work to increase the profitability of the corporation. Disregarding the effects that it has on others. That’s actually a legal principle and that’s psychopathic.

Who is going to help them abroad? They are just persecuted there. Conditions are created making their work impossible. This is a big mistake by those who are doing this in the West.

I can only go one way. I’ve not got a reverse gear.

Take the firearms first, and then go to court. A lot of times by the time you go to court, it takes so long to go to court to get the due process procedures, I like taking the guns early … Take the gun first, go through due process second.

…the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon.

Deep Throat’s information, and in my view, courage, allowed the newspaper to use what he knew and suspected.