Donald Rumsfeld

Don’t say “the White House wants.” Buildings can’t want.

Our task, your task… is to try to connect the dots before something happens. People say, ‘Well, where’s the smoking gun?’ Well, we don’t want to see a smoking gun from a weapon of mass destruction.

Don’t necessarily avoid sharp edges. Occasionally they are necessary to leadership.

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

You’re thinking of Eurpoe as Germany and France. I don’t. I think that’s old Europe.

If you try to please everybody, somebody’s not going to like it.

[on Osama bin Laden’s death] no attempt whatsoever that I can see to arrest him and put him on trial, to go through that process.

I am not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to take care of itself.

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

We all have an equal interest in stability and security throughout Europe. The years the OSCE has existed, and particularly this year, have given rise to great expectations and at the same time to powerful disappointments.

The more powerful you are, the more you dominate others, the more you create justifications for that in ideology and education and media and so on. If you’ve got your boot on someone else’s neck, it’s typical to provide a justification for it.

I have a great relationship with the Mexican people.

Russia will not soon become, if it ever becomes, a second copy of the United States or England – where liberal value have deep historic roots.

The struggle against poverty in the world and the challenge of cutting wealthy country emissions, all has a single, very simple solution. … Here it is: Put a price on carbon.

The drug war not only gets rid of the superfluous population, it frightens everybody else. Drugs play a role similar to communism or terrorism, people huddle beneath the umbrella of authority for protection from the menace.

We don’t want an America that is closed to the world. What we want is a world that is open to America.

Exaggerating slightly, in totalitarian countries the state decides the official line and everyone must then comply. Democratic societies operate differently. The line is never presented as such, merely implied. This involves brainwashing people who are still at liberty.

Since its very inception, Israel has been a threat.

The U.S. war-so-called war against terror has been a smashing success. There was a small group up in the tribal areas of mostly Pakistan and Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, and we have succeeded in spreading it over the whole world.

The political and social history of Western democracies records all sorts of efforts to ensure that the formal mechanisms are little more than wheels spinning idly. The goal is to eliminate public meddling in policy formation.

Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level – there’s a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I’m opposed to political fascism, I’m opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it’s pointless to talk about democracy.