George H. W. Bush Quotes

Like Lyndon Johnson, President Obama understands that timidity in a time of troubles is a prescription for failure.

Mistakes, after all, are endemic to foreign and military policy given the unpredictability of events and the difficulty of securing reliable information in a place like Iraq.

Global security can be formed or threatened by heads of state whose wisdom, folly and obsessions shape global events. But often it is the security practitioners, those rarely in the headlines but whose craft and energy quietly break new ground, who keep us safe or put us in peril.

A candidate’s command of foreign policy acts as a proxy for assessing broader leadership abilities.

We're an organization with a clear objective: to protect the American people. We have a number of missions that feed into that, to protect America, and one of those missions we share with the council, which is to help our policymakers make sense of global events.

Being president isn't anything like reality TV. It's not about sending insulting tweets or making fiery speeches; it's about whether or not the candidate can handle the awesome responsibility of leading this country.

I work with the president and speak with him multiple times a week. This is a man, he didn't become the president by accident. And as much as everyone wants to talk about stability, was he unstable when he passed the tax reform? Was he unstable when we finally hit back at Syria and said no more chemical weapons?

No one wants to friend or follow covert info about Pakistan's nuclear policy.

Let's remember, the CIA's job is to go out and create wars.

Sometimes in this country, we don't focus a lot on people's experience and their resume. Mitt Romney would be the most experienced executive to be nominated since 1952. The fundamental task for the next president is going to be fixing things, cleaning things up, being a turnaround artist, if you will.

You know, as director of the CIA, I got an awful lot of intelligence about all the horrible things that could go on across the world.

I think I'd be a better president because I was in combat.

I'm very confident that the solutions that we are developing are going to be effective not only in application in Iraq, but also will be very helpful for potential homeland security situations as well.

I didn't spend a lot of time on national security the American people will be glad to know.

As an old man who remembers the intellectual exhilaration and the pleasure of having done good work that characterized the CIA when it was young, I wonder if it might not be better to speak and think in terms of restoring its culture.

Bob Gates is really emblematic of the modern CIA. He joins it in 1968, just a day before the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. And, of course, he rises very quickly. In less than six years, he's on the National Security Council staff, at the closing weeks of Richard Nixon's presidency and then on into Gerald Ford.

Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be Vice President of the United States of America. Let's get that straight. She's a truly close personal friend. She is qualified to be President of the United States of America. She's easily qualified to be Vice President of the United States of America.

No man can be a politician, except he be first a historian or a traveller; for except he can see what must be, or what may be, he is no politician.

The next president needs to know foreign policy and not learn it on the job.

People don't realize what a brilliant politician Lincoln was. Looking back, we want to ascribe a level of providence to his every decision but he was a cunning and calculating politician; from the cultivation of his image as a hayseed from Illinois, to his ability to keep this country together under dire circumstances.

You don't need to know who's playing on the White House tennis court to be a good president.

George Bush has shown great skill at disguising an incredibly weak foreign policy.

Looking back over my more than a half century in intelligence, I have not experienced a time when we've been beset by more crises and threats around the globe.

We have generals working on worst-case scenarios; we need statesmen on best cases.

Diplomacy: the art of jumping into troubled waters without making a splash.