Donald Rumsfeld

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.

Presidential leadership needn’t always cost money. Look for low- and no-cost options. They can be surprisingly effective.

Don’t necessarily avoid sharp edges. Occasionally they are necessary to leadership.

When asked for your views, by the press or others, remember that what they really want to know is the President’s views.

Let your family, staff, and friends know that you’re still the same person, despite all the publicity and notoriety that accompanies your position.

If you try to please everybody, somebody’s not going to like it.

But that [‘friendly Fascism’] requires an honest ideologue, a Hitler type, not someone whose only detectable ideology is Me.

Once wide coercive powers are given to government agencies…such powers cannot be effectively controlled.

I believe the measure of a man isn’t just the road he’s traveled; it’s the choices he’s made along the way.

A man’s eyes should be torn out if he can only see the past

The U.S. government played a significant role [in the 1965 Indonesian genocide] by supplying the names of thousands of Communist Party leaders to the Indonesian army, which hunted down the leftists and killed them, former U.S. diplomats say…

The prevailing pattern is one of indignant outrage over enemy crimes with much self-congratulatory appeal to high principle, combined with a remarkable ability “not to see” in the case of crimes for which we bear responsibility.

The business world was pretty upset by the advances in public welfare in the ’60s, in particular by Richard Nixon – it’s not too well understood, but he was the last New Deal president, and they regarded that as class treachery.

We know what works. Freedom Works. We know what’s right. Freedom is right.

We need a great president.

The drug war not only gets rid of the superfluous population, it frightens everybody else. Drugs play a role similar to communism or terrorism, people huddle beneath the umbrella of authority for protection from the menace.

Without perestroika, the cold war simply would not have ended. But the world could not continue developing as it had, with the stark menace of nuclear war ever present.

And then, Sir, there is this consideration, that if the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.

Black lives must not matter until black people start respecting black lives and stop killing ourselves.

I couldn’t wait to get to the most powerful position, because I thought then I would be able to fix problems that only the leader can fix. But when I got there, I realized we needed revolutionary change.

In our democracy every young person should have an equal opportunity to obtain a higher education, regardless of his station in life or financial means.