Donald Rumsfeld

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.

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

Imagine, a September 11 with weapons of mass destruction. It’s not 3,000. It’s tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children.

It is easier to get into something than to get out of it.

Know that the amount of criticism you receive may correlate somewhat to the amount of publicity you receive.

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

We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest.

True irreverence is disrespect for another man’s god.

It is better to be frightened now than killed hereafter

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’

Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.

Perhaps man is the only being that can properly be called idle.

I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.

Common people do not pray; they only beg.

Men who for truth and honor’s sake stand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep. Who dare while others fly.They build a nation’s pillars deep. And lift them to the sky.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

I have lived with several Zen masters – all of them cats.