JOHN LEHMAN

None of us are naïve enough to believe that moving around boxes on organization charts will change behavior. You have to change culture.

A few people with a clear agenda can make a big difference in government.

Power corrupts; but absolute power is really neat.

There is so much crap [waste] going on over there [the Pentagon], I could run the Navy Department on the cost-of-living increases alone.

Senator, if you vote for us, maybe we could get a battleship into Arizona.

Gentlemen don't do that.

No one with a weak heart or delicate digestion should seek the job [Secretary of the Navy]

We were not prepared intellectually. Those of us in the national security field still carried the baggage of the Cold War. We thought in concepts of coalition warfare and the Warsaw Pact. When we thought of terrorism, we thought only of state-sponsored terrorism, which is why the immediate reaction of many in our government agencies after 9/11 was: Which state did it? … We had failed to grasp, for a variety of reasons, the new phenomenon that had emerged in the world. This was not state-sponsored terrorism. This was religious war. .... This was the emergence of a transnational enemy driven by religious fervor and fanaticism. Our enemy is not terrorism. Our enemy is violent, Islamic fundamentalism.

Congressional anarchy must be curtailed.

The visual impact of a United States battleship springs from its ability to put Soviet ships on the bottom of the sea and to put devastating firepower ashore - nothing else.

We are opening up an enormous new era in archaeology. Time capsules in the deep oceans.

There are only two powers that matter in the bureaucracy of Washington: The power to say ‘Here’s your money,” and the power to say “You’re fired!”

None of us are naïve enough to believe that moving around boxes on organization charts will change behavior. You have to change culture.

A few people with a clear agenda can make a big difference in government.

Congressional anarchy must be curtailed.

Gentlemen don't do that.

John Paul Jones was probably clinically committable, but that doesn’t take anything away fro him as a hero.

No one with a weak heart or delicate digestion should seek the job [Secretary of the Navy]

Senator, if you vote for us, maybe we could get a battleship into Arizona.

Power corrupts; but absolute power is really neat.

There is so much crap [waste] going on over there [the Pentagon], I could run the Navy Department on the cost-of-living increases alone.

We were not prepared intellectually. Those of us in the national security field still carried the baggage of the Cold War. We thought in concepts of coalition warfare and the Warsaw Pact. When we thought of terrorism, we thought only of state-sponsored terrorism, which is why the immediate reaction of many in our government agencies after 9/11 was: Which state did it? … We had failed to grasp, for a variety of reasons, the new phenomenon that had emerged in the world. This was not state-sponsored terrorism. This was religious war. .... This was the emergence of a transnational enemy driven by religious fervor and fanaticism. Our enemy is not terrorism. Our enemy is violent, Islamic fundamentalism.

Illegal stills had always been plentiful in the South, so Prohibition there did not have the bite that it had in the North.

The visual impact of a United States battleship springs from its ability to put Soviet ships on the bottom of the sea and to put devastating firepower ashore - nothing else.