Donald Rumsfeld

Be able to resign. It will improve your value to the President and do wonders for your performance.

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

Oh my goodness gracious, what you can buy off the Internet in terms of overhead photography. A trained ape can know an awful lot of what is going on in this world, just by punching on his mouse, for a relatively modest cost.

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

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

The price of being close to the President is delivering bad news. You fail him if you don’t tell him the truth. Others won’t do it.

If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.

Our strength grows out of our weakness.

I believe that every person is born with talent.

Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.

It is better to walk alone, then with a crowd going in the wrong direction.

Nay, number itself in armies importeth not much, where the people is of weak courage; for, as Virgil saith, It never troubles the wolf how many the sheep be.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

It is only through labour and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage; that we move on to better things.

I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality.

I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.

The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge caused men to fall.

I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct – nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying.

And deep in my heart. The answer, it was in me. And I made up my mind. To define my own destiny.

One cause, which is not always observed, of the insufficiency of riches, is that they very seldom make their owner rich.

There is a tendency for things to right themselves.