Donald Rumsfeld

In politics, every day is filled with numerous opportunities for serious error. Enjoy it.

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

You’re thinking of Eurpoe as Germany and France. I don’t. I think that’s old Europe.

Members of the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate are not there by accident. Each managed to get there for some reason. Learn what it was and you will know something important about them, about our country and about the American people.

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

There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it, and that’s just a fact.

Tread softly, Breathe peacefully, Laugh hysterically.

I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.

A woman is a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!

It may be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.

As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God’s hand, his brain as God’s brain, his purpose as God’s purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ.

How can one be well…when one suffers morally?

Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of competence.

True irreverence is disrespect for another man’s god.

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man’s most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion, and he whose real wants are supplied must admit those of fancy.