Donald Rumsfeld Quotes

Sausage making and policy-making shouldn't be seen close-up.

The dominant color of politics is gray; difficult choices and compromise are required at almost every step of the journey toward a major new program.

In politics there's never a magic wand.

The challenge has been, we make policy in the world of politics.

I think there's a lot to learn from Rockefeller on how to pass legislation.

It is the future, of course, which politicians grapple with, and that is why politics is so disorderly. Only history clears away some of the debris.

Politics is tricky; it cuts both ways. Every time you make a choice, it has unintended consequences.

Politics doesn't matter, policy does.

I know how to make sausage, and now that I've seen how laws are made, I'll stick with sausage.

When you are President you have to get something done, and that often means compromise.

Government is not an exact science.

Nearly all legislation is the result of compromise.

The last thing you want is to have to make a decision for political purposes.

Politics is about timing and situations.

There is something wrong with the way in which we make our decisions. The Government listen too much to the pollsters and the party managers. The trouble is that they are not even very good at politics, and they are entering too much into policy decisions. As a result, there is too much short-termism, too much reacting to events, and not enough shaping of events. We give the impression of being in office but not in power. Far too many important decisions are made for 36 hours' publicity.

Governing has always been hard.

What I love to do is the policy. The politics, I'm brand-new at.

I think politics often seems remote, and anything we can do to show more of the workings - how you make the sausage - is useful.

There's a lot of new subject matter to learn. You start slowly peeling the onion and start figuring out how the policy and the politics intersect.

I'm going to use the White House and every tool at my disposal as your president to make the case that patriotism is profitable.

Decision-making power, whether it's on foreign affairs or domestic affairs, is concentrated in the White House in a reasonably small circle.

My strong preference has always been to legislate when I can get legislation done.

In Washington, as we learned from the White House transcripts, a president may speak of kicking butts, call a problem a can of worms, decide not to be in the position of basically hunkering down, anticipate something hitting the fan, propose to tough it through, sight minefields down the road, see somebody playing hard ball, claim political savvy, and wonder what stroke some of his associates have with others.

I do politics in order to do policy.

Keeping Crooked Hillary Clinton out of the White House!