Top 63 Robert M. Gates Quotes
#2. If Poindexter made a comment to me like that, it would have been in the context of once the authorized program is approved there would be no point in having any of these private benefactors any longer.
Robert M. Gates
#3. And then, after publication of Bob Woodward's book Obama's Wars
Robert M. Gates
#4. Be very careful what you recommend to the president because he will do what you say.
Robert M. Gates
#5. I had no difficulty as Secretary of Defense moving from the Bush administration to the Obama administration.
Robert M. Gates
#6. Future U.S. political leaders, those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me, may not consider the return on America's investment in NATO worth the cost.
Robert M. Gates
#7. One of the toughest battles in intelligence is combating conventional wisdom.
Robert M. Gates
#9. and personally ate sixteen pounds of brisket. The Air Force keeps track of important things like that.
Robert M. Gates
#10. Given his campaign rhetoric about Afghanistan, I think I myself, our commanders, and our troops had expected more commitment to the cause and more passion for it from him. ...I never doubted Obama's support for the troops, only his support for their mission." Pg. 299
Robert M. Gates
#11. I told him that neither he nor anyone else should ever underestimate the strength and power of the United States: those who had - Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union - were all now in the ashcan of history.
Robert M. Gates
#12. I have always that there ought to be some kind of mandatory national service, not necessarily in the military but to show everybody that freedom isn't free, that everybody has an obligation to the nation as a community.
Robert M. Gates
#13. No president is well-served by groupthink or by everybody singing from the same sheet of music they think he's on.
Robert M. Gates
#14. I have always voted for who I believed was the best person.
Robert M. Gates
#16. I will always be an advocate in terms of wars of necessity. I am just much more cautious on wars of choice.
Robert M. Gates
#17. grew increasingly impatient and angry as I compared their selflessness and sacrifice with the self-promotion and selfishness of power-hungry politicians and others - in Baghdad, Kabul, and Washington.
Robert M. Gates
#18. And when the Soviet Union was collapsing in late 1991, Dick wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world. He and I had always had a cordial
Robert M. Gates
#19. America's civilian institutions of diplomacy and development have been chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long.
Robert M. Gates
#20. If Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us anything in recent history, it is the unpredictability of war and that these things are easier to get into than to get out of, and, frankly, the facile way in which too many people talk about, 'Well, let's just go attack them.'
Robert M. Gates
#21. Most governments lie to each other. That's the way business gets done.
Robert M. Gates
#22. The fact that our team had penetrated 150 miles into Pakistan, carried out the raid in the middle of a military garrison town, and then escaped without the Pakistani military being the wiser was an awful black eye.
Robert M. Gates
#23. Well, I've ruffled a few feathers at all the institutions I've led. But I think that's part of leadership.
Robert M. Gates
#24. twelve plus three. Steve also reminded me that fifteen-month tours brought to bear the "law of twos" - soldiers would now potentially miss two Christmases, two anniversaries, two birthdays. Still,
Robert M. Gates
#25. Uncivil, incompetent in fulfilling basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned, often putting self (and reelection) before country - this was my view of the majority of the United States Congress.
Robert M. Gates
#26. You know, if I were an - if I were a Taliban, I'd say, 'What did al-Qaida ever do for me except get me kicked out of Afghanistan?'
Robert M. Gates
#27. Some people have said, in so many words, that I'm kind of wooly-headed in believing that the Iranians would see not having nuclear weapons as more in their security interest than not.
Robert M. Gates
#28. What I know concerns me. What I don't know concerns me even more. What people aren't telling me worries me the most.
Robert M. Gates
#29. Health care costs are eating the Defense Department alive.
Robert M. Gates
#30. I don't think any president that I worked with has ever said 'pretty please.'
Robert M. Gates
#31. No administration in my entire career devoted more time and energy to working the Pakistanis than did President Obama and all his senior team.
Robert M. Gates
#32. Well, Israel, obviously, thinks of the Iranian nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel.
Robert M. Gates
#33. I mean, when you get down to very low numbers of nuclear weapons, and you contemplate going to zero, how do you deal with the reality of that technology being available to almost any country that seeks to pursue it? And what conditions do you put in place?
Robert M. Gates
#35. We should never lose sight of the ethos that has made the Marine Corps - where 'every Marine is a rifleman' - one of America's cherished institutions and one of the world's most feared and respected fighting forces
Robert M. Gates
#36. If there's ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience.
Robert M. Gates
#37. There will be boots on the ground if there's to be any hope of success in the strategy.
Robert M. Gates
#38. No policy has proved more successful in making friends for the United States, during the cold war and since, than educating students from abroad at our colleges and universities.
Robert M. Gates
#39. A wild and crazy weekend involves sitting on the front porch, smoking a cigar, reading a book.
Robert M. Gates
#40. There's a lot of books out there about how you lead change in business, but I've certainly not seen any ... on how you do that in public institutions.
Robert M. Gates
#41. I've spent my entire adult life with the United States as a superpower and one that had no compunction about spending what it took to sustain that position. And it didn't have to look over its shoulder because our economy was so strong.
Robert M. Gates
#42. I had no concerns - I had no reason to have concerns based on what was available to me about North's contacts with the private sector people, but I didn't think a CIA person should do it.
Robert M. Gates
#43. I've seen, all too often in my career, people coming in to lead agencies and organizations and trying to impose change from the top down. Never works. You never have enough time.
Robert M. Gates
#45. Until al Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, Hizballah had killed more Americans than had any terrorist group in history.
Robert M. Gates
#46. The reality is, the United States has global interests. Our defense budget is about the same as the defense budgets or military budgets of every other country in the world put together.
Robert M. Gates
#47. In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it.
Robert M. Gates
#48. President Lyndon Johnson once said, "If the first person who answers the phone cannot answer your question, it is a bureaucracy." Don
Robert M. Gates
#49. There is no international problem that can be addressed or solved without the engagement and leadership of the United States and everybody in the world knows that, its just fact of life. So sometimes I think we could conduct ourselves with a little more humility.
Robert M. Gates
#50. My adversaries were those with a traditional mind-set, the usual opponents of any idea "not invented here," those fearful that what I was trying to do threatened their existing programs and procurements.
Robert M. Gates
#51. The United States has been a global power since late in the 19th century.
Robert M. Gates
#52. He taught me early in life to take people one at a time, based on their individual qualities and never as a member of a group. That led, he said, to hatred and bias; that was what the Nazis had done.
Robert M. Gates
#53. I think that Iran with a nuclear weapon is extremely destabilizing. I think it could precipitate a nuclear arms race in the region.
Robert M. Gates
#54. And so the greatest of American triumphs ... became a peculiarly joyless victory. We had won the Cold War, but there would be no parades.
Robert M. Gates
#55. Even when I was at CIA, I'd go to visit foreign leaders and I'd say, 'You know, I'm not a diplomat. I'm just an old CIA guy' ... I said, 'If I wanted to be diplomatic, I'd have been a diplomat.'
Robert M. Gates
#56. I concluded by saying that the SEALs in that room truly gave meaning to George Orwell's observation that "people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." page 546
Robert M. Gates
#57. When I was the director of Central Intelligence in the early '90s, I tried to get the Air Force to partner with us in building drones. And they didn't want to, because they had no pilots.
Robert M. Gates
#58. One of the big changes in the Congress since I first came to Washington is that all of these folks go home every weekend. They used to play golf together; their families got to know each other, go to dinner at each other's homes at weekends - and these would be people who were political adversaries.
Robert M. Gates
#59. I wish I could set deadlines for the Congress, but that's just not the way the Constitution is written.
Robert M. Gates
#60. I've been very sensitive for a long time to the repeated pattern, during economic hard times or after a war, of the United States' essentially unilaterally disarming.
Robert M. Gates
#61. I read in the press, and therefore it must be true, that no secretary of defense had ever been quoted as arguing for a bigger budget for State.
Robert M. Gates
#62. Well, what I've said is that the war in Iraq will always be clouded by how it began, which was a wrong premise, that there were in fact no weapons of nuclear - weapons of mass destruction.
Robert M. Gates
#63. I have tried to maintain civil relationships with everyone I meet - and, even if I violently disagree with them, try to be respectful.
Robert M. Gates
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