Donald Rumsfeld

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

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

Visit with your predecessors from previous Administrations. They know the ropes and can help you see around some corners. Try to make original mistakes, rather than needlessly repeating theirs.

Learn to say “I don’t know.” If used when appropriate, it will be often.

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

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

…the media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly.

If you claim to have a theory that deduces unexpected consequences from nontrivial principles, let’s see it.

The most puzzling development in politics during the last decade is the apparent determination of Western European leaders to re-create the Soviet Union in Western Europe.

[on Trump] He is a very bright person, talented without any doubt.

When I hear people say, ‘you run,’ it’s part of the problem. We still didn’t get ‘yes we can’ right. It’s not ‘yes you can,’ it’s ‘yes we can.’ And until we get that right, it doesn’t matter who runs.

The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine.

While maintaining our nuclear potential at the proper level, we need to devote more attention to developing the entire range of means of information warfare.

Edward Bernays’ first great achievement, that sort of made a star out of him, was a public relations campaign trying to get women to smoke. So he had models walking down Fifth Avenue smoking cigarettes and showing how it makes you beautiful and slim.

No one wants the United Nations to suffer the fate of the League of Nations, which collapsed because it lacked real leverage. This is possible if influential countries bypass the United Nations and take military action without Security Council authorization.

The most important thing is that Milosevic agreed to sit at the negotiating table with the Kosovo Albanians.

In the US, there is basically one party – the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to these policies. As is most of the population.

A man’s eyes should be torn out if he can only see the past

Case by case, we find that conformity is the easy way, and the path to privilege and prestige; dissidence carries personal costs.

It is time to show the whole world that America is back – bigger and better and stronger than ever before.

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