Donald Rumsfeld

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

It isn’t making mistakes that’s critical; it’s correcting them and getting on with the principal task.

Don’t blame the boss. He has enough problems.

If you foul up, tell the President and correct it fast. Delay only compounds mistakes.

Don’t do or say things you would not like to see on the front page of The Washington Post.

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

If you’re teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.

History proves that all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government are transient. Only democratic systems are not transient. Whatever the shortcomings, mankind has not devised anything superior.

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.

Libertarian socialism, furthermore, does not limit its aims to democratic control by producers over production, but seeks to abolish all forms of domination and hierarchy in every aspect of social and personal life, an unending struggle…

I would not use the term “totalitarian” to refer to the American system of “brainwashing under freedom.” It is, nevertheless, a remarkably effective system, a fact that is rarely recognized, analyzed or understood.

[After Communism succeeds] …then, there will come a peace across the earth.

The threat of mutual destruction has always restrained participants of the international arena, prevented leading military powers from making hasty moves, and compelled participants to respect each other. U.S. withdrawal from treaties on anti-ballistic missiles is an attempt to put an end to strategic parity, but we will respond to this.

Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don’t think people didn’t know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason.

I was at the Battle of Britain memorial yesterday. I was there out of respect for that amazing moment in British history. I was also thinking about my family, my mum and dad who were there at that time in London, and worked as air raid wardens during the Blitz, and I was thinking about that. It was a respectful ceremony, and I stood in respect throughout it. […] The issue is that we had a memorial for the Battle of Britain, I was there, I showed respect for it, and I’ll show respect in the proper way at all future events.

We’re numb. We’re numb to 500 kids getting killed in Chicago last year. We’re numb that there were dozens of police shootings in the beginning of July. We’re numb to places on the earth where we don’t live. Our life is OK, but it’s OK for other people’s lives to not be OK.

Nobody and nothing will stop Russia on the road to strengthening democracy and ensuring human rights and freedoms.

If current technological processes continue without change, the environment will change, and we, the human species, will either have to mutate or even die, to disappear, as many species have disappeared.

The heart of the security agenda is protecting lives – and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st Century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century.

Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.

All official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery.