Lawrence Eagleburger Quotes

Successful and unsuccessful political policies have one commonalty. The people who created the policies thought they would be successful.

What succeeds best politically does not always do so policy wise and vice versa.

A good policy badly executed becomes a bad policy.

When the policy is controversial, you have to go out and defend it.

Once you're a winner, you can give all sorts of reasons why you're a winner. Of course, you could all those same reasons to explain why a show fails.

Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure.

Criticism of a policy is welcome. But in the garb of criticizing a policy, if you allege that the policy was made for corrupt purposes, I reject it.

Sometimes ruin comes for lack of judgment.

[Explaining a failed policy:] Our crystal ball was very muddy.

Support what works and stop supporting what does not work.

The commonest error of politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.

The statesman must weigh the rewards of success against the penalties of failure. And he is permitted only one guess.

Social science has been established not to set policy but to measure its results.

All policy is targeted in one way or another.

The proof of a theory is in its reasoning, not in its sponsorship. The proof of a theory is in its reasoning, not in its sponsorship.

If you can’t bring the people with you, you lose the policy

Much of what we're going to try will not work, and much of what does work will do so for unanticipated reasons.

It's really important that policy be properly designed. It's not enough just to.. .get angry over a subject.

The success of a particular policy prescription is always a gamble.

Every plausible policy must be followed by the question 'And then what?'

I think there is a failure in foreign policy. And you have to acknowledge that under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton was the architect of that foreign policy. Whether it was malevolent or not, I don't know.

If the idea behind Obamacare was to get everyone covered, that's one of the many failures.

The first week in intelligence school, you learn there are only two conditions in life. There is policy success, or there is intel failure. There is no other condition in life.

The human capital of most macroeconomists, heavily invested in demand management, was wiped out by the policy failures of the 1970s.

There is an old maxim which states that good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from poor judgment. I think something similar can be said of government policy, to wit: Good policy comes from experience, and experience comes from poor policy.