Donald Rumsfeld Quotes - Page 6

Within a week, or a month, Saddam could give his WMD to al-Qaeda.

I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombing in Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cut off peoples' heads on television to intimidate, to frighten indeed the word 'terrorized' is just that. Its purpose is to terrorize, to alter behavior, to make people be something other than that which they want to be.

They will do more whether we do what we're doing or whether we don't do what we're doing. And the idea that you could appease them [terrorists] by stopping doing what we're doing or some implication that by doing what we're doing we're inciting them to attack us is just utter nonsense. It's just - it's kind of like feeding an alligator, hoping it eats you last.

I think we ought to have a new rule: You can ask two questions, and then we can pick the one we want to answer.

We do have a saying in America: if you're in a hole, stop digging ..... erm, I'm not sure I should have said that.

I'm glad you asked. It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.

Is it likely that an aircraft carrier or a cruise missile is going to find a person?

We do know that the Iraqi regime has chemical and biological weapons. His regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons - including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas. His regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of biological weapons—including anthrax and botulism toxin, and possibly smallpox.

When starting at the bottom, be willing to learn from those at the top.

If I know the answer I'll tell you the answer, and if I don't I'll just respond cleverly.

It is unknowable how long that conflict [the war in Iraq] will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.

We do know of certain knowledge that he [Osama Bin Laden] is either in Afghanistan, or in some other country, or dead.

Control your own time. Don't let it be done for you. If you are working off the in-box that is fed you, you are probably working on the priority of others.

Don't 'over-control' like a novice pilot. Stay loose enough from the flow that you can observe it, modify, and improve it.

Most of the 50 or so invitations you receive each week come from people inviting the President's Chief of Staff, not you. If you doubt that, ask your predecessor how many he received last week.

Pieces of intelligence, scraps of intelligence...you run down leads and you run down leads, and you hope that sometimes it works.

After he saw what happened to Saddam Hussein, he (Gadhafi) did not want to be Saddam Hussein. He gave up his nuclear program.

With the press there is no "off the record.

I don't know anybody that I can think of who has contended that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons.

The Cold War was a war, and we won it.

A large number of people to begin crawling through those tunnels and caves looking for the bad folks.

What will follow will not be a repeat of any other conflict. It will be of a force and scope and scale that has been beyond what has been seen before.

Politics is human beings; it's addition rather than subtraction.

There are people who in large measure have information that we need . . . so that we can track down the weapons of mass destruction in that country.

We never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country.