Colin Powell Quotes - Page 13

The president's personal staff has a unique role.

The United States is not looking for a way to launch war.

The burden is on Saddam Hussein. And our policy, our national policy - not the UN policy but our national policy - is that the regime should be changed until such time as he demonstrates that it is not necessary to change the regime because the regime has changed itself.

It's really not a number I'm terribly interested in.

Organization charts and fancy titles count for next to nothing.

It's nice to say let's be bipartisan. But we're a partisan nation. We were raised as a partisan nation.

Nobody is ready to leave Iraq to be interviewed.

My two Jamaican cousins ... were studying engineering. 'That's where the money is,' Mom advised. ... I was to be an engineering major, despite my allergy to science and math. ... Those who preceded me at CCNY include the polio vaccine discoverer, Dr. Jonas Salk ... and eight Nobel Prize winners. ... In class, I stumbled through math, fumbled through physics, and did reasonably well in, and even enjoyed, geology. All I ever looked forward to was ROTC. Autobiographical comments on his original reason for going to the City College of New York, where he shortly turned to his military career.

I think the American people want to see what we want to see, and that is for the Iraqi people to have a free, open, fair election, for their forces to be built up, for our reconstruction money to be used well, and for Iraqi security forces to take over so we can start bringing our troops home.

The United States has every intention of continuing to do the kind of reconnaissance and surveillance work we have done for decades, well known to everyone, that is essential to protect our national security, and frankly, the security of our friends in various regions of the world. It is part of our collection system.

Too often we act - ask our schools to be truant officers, our teachers to be truant officers, because we're giving them children who have, you know, they're not ready to learn. And if they're not ready to learn by the third grade, they know they're behind.

I try to be the same person I was yesterday.

I recommended to the president [George Bush] that our focus had to be on al-Qaida, the Taliban and Afghanistan. Those were the ones who attacked the United States of America on 9/11.

There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more.

It is not our place to decide who should lead the Iraqi people. If Saddam [Hussein] leaves or has to be forced out of power and a new regime brought in, a new leadership brought in, I am confident it will be some combination of people inside the country and outside the country.

I would not presume from this distance, nor would America presume to say who should be the leader of the Iraqi nation.

There are lots of countries that are having these kinds of internal civil wars in other parts of the world and nobody is talking about intervening.

When you help the poorest in the world, you start to move them up an economic and social ladder, and they're not going to be moving toward violence or terrorism of the kind that we worry about.

I'll tell you what they're all going to face, whichever one of them becomes president on January 21st of 2009. They will face a military force - a United States military force that cannot sustain - continually sustain 140,000 people deployed in Iraq and the 20-odd or 25,000 people we have deployed in Afghanistan and our other deployments.

It isn’t enough just to scream at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. We need our political system to start reflecting this anger back into, 'How do we fix it? How do we get the economy going again?'

I have the deepest regret about 9/11. Sept. 11, 2001, was one of the most difficult days I've ever had. I was in Lima, Peru, and had to fly back eight hours not knowing what happened in my own country, knowing thousands of my fellow citizens had died.

What we would be committed to would be a representative government where all the Iraqi people decide who should lead their nation, and lead it in a way that keeps it together as a single nation and where all parts of the nation - Shia, Sunni and Kurds - are able to live free and in peace and believe that their interests are represented by the government.

I respect the fact that many denominations have different points of view with respect to gay marriage and they can hold that in the sanctity in the place of their religion and not bless them or solemnize them.

I'm not active in politics. I vote as a citizen. And if somebody cares to know what my opinion is at the time of the election, I might or might not share it publicly.

I have always gone through public life and saying that with respect to political candidates, I always measure each candidate against what I think the country needs at that time, and I will vote for the person I think who is most qualified to serve the nation at that time.