Donald Rumsfeld

There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it, and that’s just a fact.

If in doubt, move decisions up to the President.

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

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

Test ideas in the marketplace. You learn from hearing a range of perspectives. Consultation helps engender the support decisions need to be successfully implemented.

Plan backwards as well as forward. Set objectives and trace back to see how to achieve them. You may find that no path can get you there. Plan forward to see where your steps will take you, which may not be clear or intuitive.

I have been very happy in the House of Representatives.

But free capital mobility is a high priority for the business world: it increases profit and also provides a powerful weapon to undermine labor organizing by threat of job transfer-technically illegal, but highly effective…

As a Zionist youth leader in the 1940’s, I was among those who called for a binational state in Mandatory Palestine. When a Jewish state was declared, I felt that it should have the rights of other states – no more, no less.

How can a bureaucrat or a politician be trusted if he says loud words for the sake of Russia’s good while trying to take his funds, his money abroad?

Let’s defend the principle of a society that cares for everyone and everyone cares for everyone else.

I can’t ever remember sitting around and saying, ‘gosh let’s hurry up and get these debates going, that’ll win it for me.’ Nope.

The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization.

It is necessary sometimes to take one step backward to take two steps forward.

Stalin is the most popular figure in all of Russia.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‘Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?

Armies are not only for offensives.

[on Les Paul guitars] It’s the construction and sound of it. With this material, the wood and neck construction and scale length really yields a different sound all together, and I just gravitate towards that. I pretty much get everything I want with it, so I’m very satisfied.

Look, part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make sure that the real agents of change fall out of history, and are never recognized in the culture for what they are. So it’s necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great Men did everything – that’s part of how you teach people they can’t do anything, they’re helpless, they just have to wait for some Great Man to come along and do it for them.

The case for individual freedom rests largely upon the recognition of the inevitable and universal ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievements of our ends and welfare depend.

The other candidates – they went in, they didn’t know the air conditioning didn’t work. They sweated like dogs…How are they gonna beat ISIS? I don’t think it’s gonna happen.