Donald Rumsfeld

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

In the execution of Presidential decisions work to be true to his views, in fact and tone.

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

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

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

Treat each federal dollar as if it was hard earned; it was – by a taxpayer.

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

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

For 18 years I have resisted talking about current events. I am not going to start now.

The financial industry, that means Goldman Sachs, if managed properly, will calculate the potential cost to itself if a loan goes bad, but not the impact on the financial system, which can be severe. This inherent deficiency of markets is well known.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

It didn’t take very many forces to destroy huge numbers of natives, not so much because the technology was better, but because the Europeans fought differently. If we were to be honest about the history, we would describe European colonialism simply as a barbarian invasion.

The PR industry…have a conception of what a democracy ought to be…the specialized class are trained to do their work for the service of the masters…and the rest of the population ought to be deprived of any form of organization because organization just causes trouble.

One of they key problems today is that politics is such a disgrace. Good people don’t go into government.

Other human rights atrocities from African slavery to the killing fields of Cambodia, the Armenian and Rwandan Genocides are all of course to be remembered, but diluting their particularity or comparing degrees of evil does no good.

Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.

The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category-except for the category of familiarity.

The only card [Hillary Clinton] has is the woman’s card. She’s got nothing else to offer and frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the woman’s card, and the beautiful thing is, women don’t like her.

Everyone who is critical of Israeli policy is deluged by crazed messages intended to flood their email system or, more insidiously, passwords are accessed and messages sent out under their name! I’m sure it’s illegal. It’s also an effort to undermine free speech.

People are tired of seeing politicians as all talk and no action.

Sometimes people ask me why I began perestroika. Were the causes basically domestic or foreign? The domestic reasons were undoubtedly the main ones, but the danger of nuclear war was so serious that it was a no less significant factor.