Dick Cheney Quotes

I think we'll see it mostly in the United States. We're getting to the point where al Qaeda is ready to again attack us inside America. I think we're basically defenseless.

What we have done is when the threat has been directed at the United States, i.e., the terrorist threat from ISIL or Al-Qaeda in Syria, is to go after them.

Once we got hit by - on 9/11 and lost 3,000 people that day, we recognized, and it was one of the key decisions President Bush made, that this is not a law enforcement problem, it is a strategic threat to the United States. It's a war. And based on that, we then adopted a whole set of policies that flowed out of that proposition.

The terrorism danger to the United States "is even worse than September 11th, when 19 hijackers murdered almost 3,000 Americans."

We knew that al-Qaida was a threat to our country. We knew that the Clinton administration understood this and was working against al-Qaida We did not ignore al-Qaida. We spent a lot of our time thinking about terrorism, what should we do about it.

I think our nation's at war with radical Islam. The primary goal of these groups is to attack our nation. Washington's a prime target.

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.

For me, 9/11 was a game changer. It altered my perception of the security threat we faced. I took the position that Britain should be shoulder to shoulder with the U.S. It was a big decision; I didn't take it lightly, or in ignorance of its consequences. It's a big commitment for a country to give, but I believed it was the right thing to do.

We need a president who understands the first obligation of the commander-in-chief is to keep America safe. If I am elected president, we will hunt down and kill the terrorists. We will utterly destroy ISIS.

There is no way you're going to have an event like 9/11 and expect things to remain the same. They killed 3,000 people in New York on that day, and if they could have they would've killed 300,000.

And beyond that, the next issue is how do we guarantee one of these weapons, not necessarily this missile, but nuclear weapons ends up in the hands of Al Qaeda or some other terrorist group.

The fact that we haven't faced another major terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11 is a very significant achievement, and one that's easy to forget - it's the dog that doesn't bark.

The country was not focused on terrorism before September 11th.

One of the worst things we could do is start to act now as though the attack of 9/11 is a thing of the past and will never be repeated. That's just not true.

The anguish in London is a vivid reminder of why we cannot relent in taking the steps necessary to defend our homeland from the present terrorist threat.

I'm absolutely convinced that the threat we face now, the idea of a terrorist in the middle of one of our cities with a nuclear weapon, is very real and that we have to use extraordinary measures to deal with it.

One of the things that I've learned, and I think we've all learned, is that we are not going to get the kind of decisive, permanent victories in this fight against terrorism that we would get from fighting another country. We're not going to get that MacArthur/Emperor moment, because by definition, even after decimating Al Qaeda in the Fata, even after taking out [Osama] bin Laden there's still people there who have both the interest and the capacity if we don't maintain vigilance to strike against the United States.

One mushroom cloud would change history. My deepest fear is that this is exactly what they [Al Qaeda] intend.

Our top story, in 'Threat Matrix Reloaded' news ... Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Muller held a press conference today to announce that Al Qaeda is planning attacks somewhere inside the United States at sometime in the future. So go about your normal lives, but with a vague sense of foreboding.

(Terrorists) are planning to disrupt our democratic process. It's scary I know, but we're not going to let al Qaeda tell us what to do. In fact, our government has decided that if al Qaeda attempts to disrupt our democratic process, we are going to respond by disrupting it first.

Russia is probably one of the first countries to have been confronted with this problem of terrorism. It took some time before the international community realised the danger terrorism poses.

Credible reporting indicates that Al Qaeda is moving forward with its plans to carry out a large-scale attack in the United States in an effort to disrupt our democratic process.

The United States has an absolute duty to attack terrorism where it lives and breeds, in order to prevent future attacks on American citizens around the world. The American people stand united in the face of terrorism. The men and women who undertook this mission deserve our praise and prayers.

I can tell you that I think America is safer today than it was on 9/11. But that doesn't mean that we don't have a long way to go.

And terrorists who seek to harm our citizens will feel the long arm of American justice.