Donald Rumsfeld

Arguments of convenience lack integrity and inevitably trip you up.

In our system leadership is by consent, not command. To lead a President must persuade. Personal contacts and experiences help shape his thinking. They can be critical to his persuasiveness and thus to his leadership.

Preserve the President’s options. He may need them.

The price of being close to the President is delivering bad news. You fail him if you don’t tell him the truth. Others won’t do it.

Work continuously to trim the White House staff from your first day to your last. All the pressures are to the contrary.

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

I have never accepted what many people have kindly said-namely that I inspired the nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless, and as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it.

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

We are happier in many ways when we are old than when we were young. The young sow wild oats. The old grow sage.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

If you shoot at a king you must kill him.

Any enlightenment which requires to be authenticated, certified, recognized, congratulated, is false, or at least incomplete.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

All styles are good except the tiresome kind.

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.