Donald Rumsfeld

Prune – prune businesses, products, activities, people. Do it annually.

Congress, the press, and the bureaucracy too often focus on how much money or effort is spent, rather than whether the money or effort actually achieves the announced goal.

Leave the President’s family business to him. You will have plenty to do without trying to manage the First Family. They are likely to do fine without your help.

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

With the press there is no ‘off the record’.

Work continuously to trim the White House staff from your first day to your last. All the pressures are to the contrary.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Wherever work is done, victory is attained.

A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.

Fatigue makes cowards of us all.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought -a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

The only wealth is life.

If you want to reach a state of bliss, then go beyond your ego and the internal dialogue. Make a decision to relinquish the need to control, the need to be approved, and the need to judge. Those are the three things the ego is doing all the time. It’s very important to be aware of them every time they come up.

Trust instinct to the end, even though you can give no reason.

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.