Donald Rumsfeld Quotes

I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country.

There are conservatives who say, 'Why would you show the country in a weak way?' And there are liberals who say I'm exploitative.

Instead of engaging on the merits and saying, "Well, we want an open border, you know, we really do," and that's all good for America because they know the people will reject that, they [the elites] attack Donald Trump as an extremist, which I think is unfair.

Critics of Donald Trump take him literally, but not seriously. His supporters take him seriously, but not literally.

Hillary Clinton calls our people deplorable, a large group, and irredeemable. I will be a president for all of our people.

President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?

There is no question that, in 1980, Ronald Reagan had been portrayed as a war-monger, somebody who couldn't do anything off a script. And the one debate with President Jimmy Carter, he stood toe-to-toe and reassured people that he wasn't bound and determined to start World War III on the spot and could make a coherent statement.

Finally, the president added, 'The American people are idealists, but they also want their leaders to be realistic...'

If a President must constantly remind the people that we're at war, then we're not.

Since terrorists are pouring into Iraq in response to calls from international terrorist networks, the number of those who are killed is especially important, for these are people who will no longer be around to launch more attacks on American soil. Iraq has become a magnet for enemies of the United States, a place where they can be killed wholesale, thousands of miles away.

Many people ... prefer to describe themselves as progressives rather than liberals. To some extent that's a response to the decades-long propaganda campaign conducted by movement conservatives, which has been quite successful in making Americans disdain the word liberal but much less successful in reducing support for liberal policies.

Most of the people who were responsible for 9/11 are now in custody or have been killed. But there are others, and they plot and they plan, and they hope to pull it off again. And while we have to be right 100 percent of the time, they only have to be right once. So there's no way to overreact to that.

Playing the president is interesting because, unlike a lot of different roles, people pay so close attention to who the president is, all of them, everybody's got an opinion about the president.

I wanted us to be careful about, going to the corner diner, interviewing three people and saying, "here's the mood of the public."

President George W. Bush is endangering the United States and the world's safety while undermining American values.

National security, the government is in charge of that. And you better have a president that understands the threats we [the state] face and what we have to do about it and if you can't articulate that as a candidate, you cannot be commander-in-chief.

there's a reason regular people don't appear on TV: we're boring.

This is going to kill me. I am the world's greatest person that does not want to let people into the country. And now I am agreeing to take 2,000 people and I agree I can vet them, but that puts me in a bad position.

Let me start off by saying that in 2000 I said, 'Vote for me. I'm an agent of change.' In 2004, I said, 'I'm not interested in change - I want to continue as president.' Every candidate has got to say 'change.' That's what the American people expect.

Some people might only recognize me half naked in my bikini and bra!

Apparently we've got open borders. We've got people in this country all over the place that could be part of cells. After 9/11 happened, you have to understand, leadership and law enforcement after 9/11, they really got reamed for doing a horrible job of preventing it when in many people's minds it was preventable.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the Patriot Act was rushed to the floor. Several hundred pages. Nobody read it ... But people voted because they were fearful and people said there could be another attack and Americans will blame me if I don't vote on this.

I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president — which means, in our time, a dangerous president — unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.

Donald Trump, when he gives his speeches, talks like a populist. And he talks to middle class and working America and poor people. But when he governs, at least in his first 40 days, he governs like a hard-right guy.

I know a lot of you believe that most people in the news business are liberal. Let me tell you, I know a lot of them, and they were almost evenly divided this time. Half of them liked Senator Kerry; the other half hated President Bush.