Donald Rumsfeld

Be yourself. Follow your instincts. Success depends, at least in part, on the ability to carry it off.

Don’t automatically obey Presidential directives if you disagree or if you suspect he hasn’t considered key aspects of the issue.

Secretary Powell and I agree on every single issue that has ever been before this administration except for those instances where Colin’s still learning.

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

Make decisions about the President’s personal security. He can overrule you, but don’t ask him to be the one to counsel caution.

If you develop rules, never have more than ten.

The executive branch tries to follow policies of plausible deniability, which means that messages are given to the CIA to do things but without a paper trail, without a record. When the story comes out later it looks as if the CIA is doing things on their own.

This war is not as in the past: whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system.

Why does the world dislike Russia? I do not think that we are unloved or considered to be ignorant.

Europe has found itself confronted with fresh challenges – challenges of a global character, the nature of which is directly connected with changes in the international climate and the difficulties of seeking new models for co-operation.

Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.

You can do a lot more with weapons and politeness than just politeness.

After all the proper subjects of taxation have been exhausted, if the exigencies of the state still continue to require new taxes, they must be imposed upon improper ones.

And [Saudi Arabia] is strongly backed by the United States and its allies, Britain and France. Reason? It’s got a lot of oil. It’s got a lot of money. You can sell them a lot of arms, I think tens of billions of dollars of arms.

Revolution can never be forecast; it cannot be foretold; it comes of itself. Revolution is brewing and is bound to flare up.

You can live within the institutions and work hard to change them.

Starting reforms in the Soviet Union was only possible from above, only from above. Any attempt to go from below was suppressed, suppressed in a most resolute way.

There was a study that was reported in the MIT Technology Review [in Dec 2015] saying that [in the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere] the current average temperature rise is equivalent to moving south about ten meters a day. That’s pretty fast.

I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth, environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

Both political parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period. Today’s New Democrats are pretty much what used to be called ‘moderate Republicans’. The ‘political revolution’ that Bernie Sanders called for, rightly, would not have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower.

Every country should conduct its own reforms, should develop its own model, taking into account the experience of other countries, whether close neighbours or far away countries.