Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Rumsfeld. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Rumsfeld Quotes And Sayings by 93 Authors including Walter Karp,Napoleon Bonaparte,Cindy Sheehan,John Lewis Gaddis,Bill Kristol for you to enjoy and share.
What chiefly governs the [U.S.] military budget is the need to spend enormous sums of money in a useless way. The allegedly powerful Pentagon is simply a receptacle for wasteful expenditure, just as a city dump is the receptacle for the refuse of a city.
It follows that any commander in chief who undertakes to carry out a plan which he considers defective is at fault; he must put forth his reasons, insist on the plan being changed, and finally tender his resignation rather than be the instrument of h
Let's push the Pentagon off the fiscal cliff.
George W. Bush has much to evaluate: he has presided over the most sweeping redesign of U.S. grand strategy since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
All defense secretaries in wartime have, needless to say, made misjudgments.
I think Bush came back because Colin Powell was there. Hey, I'm the brigadier general, baby.
I find George Bush and Dick Cheney frightening, Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft frightening.
I'm not supposed to know anything about foreign policy. Just thought I'd throw that out.
Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.
If war is too important to trust to generals, then policy is too important to trust to politicians.
The President's very shrewd
Not surprisingly, there's nothing to do at the Pentagon except start a war.
I never expected to be Defence Secretary. It's a great privilege.
This person should not be directly connected with the President Ford Committee nor should he be seen as a member of the liberal wing of the Republican Party. He should be someone like Laird or Rogers Morton.
I frown at him. How does he know all this information? And why, after two years of avoiding becoming a Dauntless leader at all costs, is he suddenly acting like one?
War is too important to be left to the generals
He who fox-like got his rank, Is wolf-like in his office.
In recent years, anyone in the government, certainly anyone in the FBI or the CIA, or recently, in again, Clint's film, In the Line of Fire, the main bad guy is the chief advisor to the president.
Winston Niles Rumfoord was something else again - morally, spatially, socially, sexually, and electrically.
The day General Soleimani flew back from Moscow to Iran was the day we believed that Russia used cyber warfare against the joint chiefs. We need a new commander in chief that will stand up to our enemies.
Note the three most important Cabinet positions. Rice said that it was better to find the weapons of mass destruction than to see a mushroom cloud.
Wait a minute! I'm not interested in agriculture. I want the military stuff. During a briefing military stuff in which officials began telling him about missile silos.
The president is the cuticle of the nail bed of America: one would think pushing back makes him stronger, yet it turns out the opposite is true.
It is always important in matters of high politics to know what you do not know. Those who think that they know, but are mistaken, and act upon their mistakes, are the most dangerous people to have in charge.
I am a war president.
A commander in chief ought to say to himself several times a day: If the enemy should appear on my front, on my right, on my left, what would I do? And if the question finds him uncertain, he is not well placed, he is not as he should be, and he should remedy it.
Bush himself came into office with no curiosity about the world, only a suspicion that his predecessor had entangled America in far too many obscure places of no importance to national interests. Wolfowitz
The jelly-bean eating thug says that national defense is important. But national defense starts at home.
What this White House really needs is a chief of staff who can read Machiavelli in the original Italian.
Don't say his name. I don't want him in here. I will cut him out.
Speaker John Boehner complained that Barack Obama ordered the U.S. military into combat in Libya without clearly defining the mission to the American people and Congress. See, apparently, you're only allowed to do that when invading Iraq.
Jean Kirkpatrick [is] the chief sadist-in-residence of the Reagan Administration
There was a feeling during the years of George W. Bush's presidency that his gracelessness as well as his appetite for war were linked to his impatience with complexity. He acted 'from the gut,' and was economical with the truth until it disappeared.
Newt Gingrich says he wants to get rid of Social Security. Who is more qualified to give this country financial advice than a guy who ran up a half-million dollar bill at Tiffany?
The brazen throat of war.
I think you can be an enemy of Saddam Hussein even if Donald Rumsfeld is also an enemy of Saddam Hussein.
President Bush, have a hot dog with me.
If we're going to preach about democracy we're going to have to make difficult decisions. We're not going to sell our values out for basing rights, particularly when (Defense) Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld himself noted that there were options to the base in Uzbekistan
A general-in-chief should ask himself several times in the day, What if the enemy were to appear now in my front, or on my right, or my left?
I always thought Henry Kissinger was a disaster because he lies like most people breathe and you can't have that in public life.
When American presidents prepare for foreign wars, they lie.
But I made him the Deputy Secretary for Homeland Security because that added an element of political espionage.
When Rumsfeld gets up on television and says we have definitive intelligence that al Qaeda is working with Iraq, how is an ordinary citizen supposed to react? They won't tell you the evidence, and when anyone asks, they say, 'Well, you know: It's secret.'
In the history of modern warfare, it is doubtful if there are any generals at the top of a command pyramid who have displayed such collective incompetence as these two officers.
Bush, himself the most intellectually backward American president of my political lifetime, is surrounded by advisers whose bellicosity is exceeded only by their political, military and diplomatic illiteracy.
John Kerry told Tom Ridge he was too busy to receive a Homeland Security briefing. I thought that was odd, since you're not supposed to ignore terrorist threats until after you become president.
I've already heard from some military commanders who feel they've been undercut by the vice president of the United States, and there's a lot of justification for their view.
Gingrich - Primary mission, Advocate of civilization, Definer of civilization, Teacher of the rules of civilization, Leader of the civilizing forces.
Donald Rumsfeld should not just be impeached. He should be tried as a war criminal. As for Bush, he can be dispatched by the electorate while we are still a democracy.
A president who is burdened with a failed and unpopular war, and who has lost the trust of the country, simply can no longer govern. He is destined to become as much a failure as his war.
We need a smaller and elite military, as [Donald]Rumsfeld said - and also a smaller and elite foreign policy.
I fired MacArthur because he wouldn't respect the authority of the president. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was.
That Obama I would like to cut his nuts off.
The indecisiveness and ambivalence so devastatingly described by both of Obama's previous secretaries of defense, Leon Panetta and Bob Gates, are already beginning to characterize the Syria campaign.
Generals aren't in the business of commenting on the correctness or incorrectness of the President's decisions. Anybody who thinks he should be able to do that ought to be fired on the spot.
The most important decisions in organizations are people decisions, and yet only the military, and only recently, has begun to ask, "If we assign this general to lead this base, what do we expect him to accomplish?"
The press secretary who starts to narrow down or close the president's options because he answers delicate negotiating questions no longer serves the president.
The American people on the ground need a clearer, stronger, Lyndon B. Johnson-type voice from their president.
A commander in chief with military experience might be able to prod a conservative military into thinking more imaginatively.
Feith had achieved the reputation in some military circles as 'the dumbest ... guy on the planet.'
I talked to General Downer about some of the funding about the National Guard and some of the civil defense workers, the firefighters, the police officers, and the way that FEMA is making them spend that money. We have got a problem there.
That man will fight us every day and every hour till the end of the war.
I just wish we knew a little less about his urethra and a little more about his arms sales to Iran.
Who the heck is Donald Trump to fire me? I regret I didn't tell Donald Trump, 'You need to fire your barber. I'm sorry. I ain't feeling you, man. You're fired! I fire you, Donald Trump.'
It may be of interest to future generals to realize that one makes plans to fit circumstances stances and does not create circumstances to fit plans. That way danger lies.
He began to wonder with genuine concern just what sort of shithead the Pentagon had foisted on him.
To win this war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.
The guy [Bill Clinton] was a known, let's say, "raconteur."
I ask the vice president to stop dodging the issue with legalese, and acknowledge his continued ties with Halliburton to the American people.
Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant 'whiz kids' tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.
Bush is the face on the can. But who canned that soup?
You know when you're milking a cow and you have all that foamy white milk in the bucket and you're just about through, when all of a sudden the cow switches her tail through a pile of manure and slaps it into that foamy white milk. That's Bill Fulbright.
Trump might have appointed a less-eerie chief to replace Manafort. But instead he doubled-down, choosing the even eerier Stephen Bannon. Bannon
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. - RUMI
President [Barack]Obama benefits from the shared experience and wisdom of top national security and foreign policy advisers, many of them career professionals.
The war against ISIS will pose many new challenges for the next commander-in-chief. The last two presidents [George W. Bush and Barack Obama] pursued a Middle East policy that supported toppling dictators to try to promote democracy.
The staff used to say, "When the president eats, everybody eats." That kind of leadership is real. I figured the saying applied to every president but really the saying came from Bush 41's years. He appreciated the lowest on the totem pole because he'd once pounded the Navy pavement.
According to Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief, Bush was so obsessed with Iraq that he failed to take action against Osama Bin Laden despite repeated warnings from his intelligence experts.
We want to get rid of the militarist not simply because he hurts and kills, but because he is an intolerable thick-voiced blockhead who stands hectoring and blustering in our way of achievement.
If you feel that the Chief of the General Staff talks only rubbish, my place is not here. Better to give me a command at the front where I can be of better use!
Having committed ourselves to Iraq, we must prevail, and to prevail, we must fund all of the requirements for our military. We must do it adequately and promptly, and the administration is doing neither.
I think they need to remove the general. He is unfit for the position he is being called upon to serve, precisely because he's become a liability. He's become a weapon our enemies will use against us.
The conduct of President Bush's war of choice has been plagued with incompetent civilian leadership decisions that have cost many lives and rendered the war on and occupation of Iraq a strategic policy disaster for the United States.
I thought Gen. McChrystal was unfireable, that his position was secure.
Bolton's exactly what the U.N. needs at this point. The president's right on the mark in picking him.
Who's running things?
When a president promises something beyond his years in office, he is fundamentally unaccountable. It is not his budget that must finish the job. Another president inherits the problem, and it becomes a ball too easily dropped, a plan too easily abandoned, a dream too readily deferred.
I didn't realize the president was such an historian.
Name me a leader who has a better idea for homeland security than making us take off our shoes in airports and throw away our shampoo?
I'm smarter than Grant; I know more about organization, supply and administration and about everything else than he does; but I'll tell you where he beats me and he beats the world. he don't care a damn for what the enemy does out of his sight, but it scares me like hell.
Our bodyguard is a born-again Christian with a father complex, a drinking problem, intellectual limitations and not enough backbone to do his military service with honor. In short, a guy we should be pleased is going to be reelected today.
If in doubt, move decisions up to the President.
Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terrorism have reduced the pace of military transformation and have revealed our lack of preparation for defensive and stability operations. This Administration has overextended our military.
A Commander-in-Chief needs to do two things. One - tell us who the enemy is. And two - say we are fighting to win.
People often think that there's a general who makes all the difference, but I would reject that. It's a team effort. It's the power of the wedge.
War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement
The left, of course, will say Carson doesn't believe in the Geneva Convention, Carson doesn't believe in fighting stupid wars. And - and what we have to remember is we want to utilize the tremendous intellect that we have in the military to win wars.
But I will say that Harve Presnell ... he was one of those guys who, when you're standing in a room with him ... he's such an older masculine force that I remember thinking, 'Wow, his voice makes me sound like Pee-Wee Herman.'
I'm the President, but he's The Boss.
Houstrong>sstrong>e Speaker John Boehner strong>sstrong>aystrong>sstrong> Prestrong>sstrong>ident Obama strong>sstrong>hould have clearly outlined histrong>sstrong> exact planstrong>sstrong> before bombing Libya. Apparently it'strong>sstrong> only Iraq where you don't have to do that.