Retired General Quotes

“There is a war on terror that must be fought. Nobody's immune... And so rather than finding fault with what Spain has done by being aggressive in the war on terror, this should redouble everyone's efforts to go after terrorist organizations of any kind... Terror has to be brought to an end.”

“The only bipartisanship you ever see is when they finally sign a bill and everybody says, 'Gee, isn't that wonderful?'”

“I'll tell you what they're all going to face, whichever one of them becomes president on January 21st of 2009. They will face a military force - a United States military force that cannot sustain - continually sustain 140,000 people deployed in Iraq and the 20-odd or 25,000 people we have deployed in Afghanistan and our other deployments.”

“Economy's got to get moving, we've got to get the unemployment rate down. That may be the defining issue of the campaign.”

“In the army, all combat officers are taught the "Estimate of the Situation": When you are faced with a problem - take that hill, or in business maybe grow your market share - the first thing you do is to make an analysis of your environment.”

“Bahrain is moving at one pace, Morocco another, Qatar at another, Kuwait at yet another. And we are there to assist our friends.”

“There are a lot of bigger issues we have to be worrying about with respect to our relationship to China, and the longer they drag out the situation, the more difficult it is to get this relationship back on track.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, these are not assertions. These are facts, corroborated by many sources, some of them sources of the intelligence services of other countries.”

“The United States stands willing to work with a transformed Palestinian Authority with new leaders coming to the front.”

“There are lots of countries that are having these kinds of internal civil wars in other parts of the world and nobody is talking about intervening.”

“President Kennedy didn't negotiate out of the Cuban missile crisis simply because he and Khrushchev got along well. Khrushchev didn't have the cards.”

“Fear is a normal human emotion. It is not in itself a killer. We can learn to be aware when fear grips us, and can train to operate through and in spite of our fear. If, on the other hand, we don't understand that fear is normal and has to be controlled and overcome, it will paralyze us and stop us in our tracks. We will no longer think clearly or analyze rationally. We prepare for it and control it; we never let it control us. It if does, we cannot lead.”

“Politics is different, because the mission is always to get the necessary votes. A good politician goes through everything in terms of mission and vision, and resourcing, but at the end of the day politicians have to make compromises in order to achieve consensus.”

“America has a terrible educational problem in the sense that we have too many youngsters not finishing school. A third of our kids don't finish high school, 50 percent of minorities don't finish high school.”

“Foe means enemy. Now, will we have differences of opinion with the Russians? Yes. Will they get mad at us from time to time, and we get mad at them? That's part of the normal diplomatic relations.”

“Get mad, then get over it.”

“It is the fault of the United States that these terrible people, these insurgents and terrorists are out there. They are the ones that we ought to be focusing our energy on defeating and not just wring our hands about the fact that it's going to be difficult.”

“With respect to our friends in the [Iraq] region, each has its own system, each will have to make its own judgment as to whether it will change, how fast it will change, and we hope that we can help influence them as to how change comes about and what change might be better for them than other forms of change.”

“This is something else that is drilled into us in the military: Make sure you know who your replacement is, in case you become a casualty. So you have to have depth within an organization.”

“I have the deepest regret about 9/11. Sept. 11, 2001, was one of the most difficult days I've ever had. I was in Lima, Peru, and had to fly back eight hours not knowing what happened in my own country, knowing thousands of my fellow citizens had died.”

“Terrorism threat is serious, and not just to American interests. The assaults in Russia against two airliners, bringing them out of the sky, and against a subway station, and then that horrible scene at the school in Beslan. This kind of terrorist activity no one is immune from it. And so it suggests that we have to do even more together to make sure the civilized worlds join together in the war against terrorism.”

“But just as they did in Philadelphia when they were writing the constitution, sooner or later, you've got to compromise. You've got to start making the compromises that arrive at a consensus and move the country forward.”

“One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.”

“Russia isn't going to start a war. They can't afford it. I think Mr. Putin can be dealt with if we stop screaming at him. You can work with the guy. You just have to know who he is.”

“Every organization should tolerate rebels who tell the emperor he has no clothes”