Great Throughts Treasury

"I don't read books, I write them."

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

"I do not stand on protocol. If you just call me Excellency, it will be okay."

"I can think of no faster way to unite the American people behind George W. Bush than a terrorist attack on an American target overseas. And I believe George W. Bush will quickly unite the American people through his foreign policy."

"I think it was a successful trip. The president made the basic point of his strategy and of his concerns in a number of countries."

"I hope you don't learn too fast."

"I think, to look at withdrawal from Iraq strictly in terms of our own election cycle could lead to a disaster."

"I think the only way to go is to do what they think is the right thing and explain it as well as they can to the American people, as the president is attempting to do with these speeches. The public will not forgive you for losing even if it seems to reflect what they thought they wanted."

"I would be amazed if a three-day campaign made a decisive difference," "[W]e did not do, in my view, enough damage to degrade it [Iraq's programs for weapons of mass destruction] for six months. It doesn't make any significant difference because in six months to a year they will be back to where they are and we cannot keep repeating these attacks. [. . .] At the end of the day what will be decisive is what the situation in the Middle East will be two to three years from now. If Saddam is still there, if he's rearming, if the sanctions are lifted, we will have lost, no matter what spin we put on it"

"I think there is a chance of this working as long as ... at the end of what is being done, the terrorists should not be able to say that they got us to do things that we would not have done except for terrorism,"

"I want to get into the President's head some idea of what he can do. If military actions are recommended to him for decision, I want him to know what he is doing when he decides."

"If East Pakistan becomes independent, it is going to become a cesspool. It's going to be 100 million people; they have the lowest standard of living in Asia. They are going to become a ripe field for communist infiltration."

"If a radical government emerges in Baghdad or if any part of Iraq becomes what Afghanistan used to be, a training ground for terrorists, then this will be a catastrophe for the Islamic world and for Europe, much as they may -- reluctant as they may be to admit it -- and eventually for us."

"If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation, and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress."

"If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent."

"If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless."

"If Tehran insists on combining the Persian imperial tradition with contemporary Islamic fervor, then a collision with America ? and, indeed, with its negotiating partners of the Six ? is unavoidable. Iran simply cannot be permitted to fulfill a dream of imperial rule in a region of such importance to the rest of the world."

"If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately."

"If you do not know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere."

"If you believe that their real intention is to kill you, it isn't unreasonable to believe that they would lie to you."

"If we do what is necessary. All the odds are in our favor."

"If you mean by "military victory" an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible."

"I'm confident John Bolton will bring peace to the world before he brings peace to his relations with The New York Times,"

"In the 1950s and 1960s we put several thousand nuclear weapons into Europe. To be sure, we had no precise idea of what to do with them."

"In relations with many domestically weak countries, a radio transmitter can be a more effective form of pressure than a squadron of B-52s."

"In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win."

"It is hard to believe that Kay is no longer among us. But in a way, she will never leave us. Her place in this country will not be filled, nor the void her death leaves on the lives of her friends,"

"Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral."

"It is important for us and it is important for the war against terrorism that the outcome, whatever it is, is not perceived as having been elicited from us by suicide bombing, and that one side has to make the territorial concession and the other side only recognizes that it exists but changes nothing else, ... American Morning."

"It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true."

"It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination."

"It is barely conceivable that there are people who like war."

"It is not unreasonable for us to desire some options. Some Europeans, I know, believe it is necessary that we guarantee our own destruction to give them the assurances they claim they need. However, to deprive ourselves of options is to paralyze us. ... What do we mean by control of escalation?"

"It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it."

"Kay ennobled all of her human relationships... In the pain of this moment, none of us would trade places with those whose lives were never touched by Kay Graham."

"It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise."

"Just as the Israelis have to do things that are very painful to them which have been spelled out in detail and forcefully by the president, the Arab states have to state that suicide bombing is not an appropriate means of achieving Arab objectives,"

"I've always acted alone. Americans like that immensely."

"Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision."

"Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy."

"Never take a job that has no "in" box."

"Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts."

"My heart goes out to the president because I've served in an administration that faced a very divided country in a very difficult set of circumstances."

"Next week there can't be any crisis. My schedule is already full."

"Nixon wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything about it. It's an order, to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves."

"No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time."

"No one will ever win the battle of the sexes. There's too much fraternizing with the enemy."

"Ninety eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hardworking, honest Americans. It?s the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them."

"No foreign policy - no matter how ingenious - has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none."

"On the one hand we want the Soviets to think that the situation might get out of hand, while on the other hand we want to persuade them not to let it get out of hand. The Soviets might stop without a major nuclear exchange. I don't believe they have an unlimited urge to escalate. I think they will be looking for excuses not to escalate."