George W. Bush Quotes

The attacks of September 11 persuaded many Americans that what might seem to be obscure or distant potential threats can very quickly materialize and it therefore makes sense to attend to them even before they become urgent.

I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most dangerous weapons.

I think it's only fair that Americans take into account who can keep them safe. Who has the best ideas for defeating ISIS. And protecting us here at home. I think I have laid out what I believe would work.

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 objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.

In my judgment, the only way to deal with terrorists is to stay on the offensive, is to find them and bring them to justice before they hurt us again.

We're fighting a war on terror because the enemy attacked us first, and hit us hard. ... Al Qaeda's leadership has said they have the right to kill four million Americans,... For nearly six years now, the United States has been able to defeat their attempts to attack us here at home. Nobody can guarantee that we won't be hit again.

The bottom line is we are pursuing every single possible action to keep our country safe from terrorism.

Terrorism - radical jihadist terrorism is not theoretical to me. It's real. And for seven years, I spent my life protecting our country against another one of those attacks. You won't have to worry when I'm President of the Untied States whether that can be done because I've already done it. I want the chance to do it again to protect you, your children and your families.

We need to be on a war footing. We need to understand that our nation is in grave danger.

I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense and - you have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows - (know) this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday.

I don't know about [Rex] Tillerson, but I do know that John Bolton doesn't get it. He still believes in regime change. He's still a big cheerleader for the Iraq war. He's promoted a nuclear attack by Israel on Iran. He wants to do regime change in Iran. So, I think John Bolton is so far out of it and has such a naive understanding of the world. If he were to be the assistant or the undersecretary for Tillerson, I'm an out automatic no on Bolton.

I believe we should use any and all means necessary to take out people who pose a threat to us and our friends around the world.

I'm a former federal prosecutor, I've fought terrorists and won and when we get back in the White House we will fight terrorists and win again and America will be safe.

Iraq was only the latest in a succession of countries. Earlier, there was Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, Granada, Panama. But this time it wasn't just your ordinary brand of friendly neighborhood frenzy. It was frenzy with a purpose. It ushered in an old doctrine in a new bottle: the doctrine of preemptive strike, also known as the United States can do whatever the hell it wants, and that's official. The war against Iraq has been fought and won, and no weapons of mass destruction have been found, not even a little one.

We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term.

I'm concerned, too, about ISIS' ability, right, to infiltrate people. But we have got some very effective, robust processes for vetting people. We brought in thousands of Iraqi refugees after the Iraq War. Not a single one has ever turned out to be a terrorist because the vetting was so good.

I vowed to our countrymen that I would do everything I could to protect the American people... That's why I said to Afghanistan: If you harbor a terrorist, you're just as guilty as the terrorist.

I share the Presidents commitment to fighting and winning the war on terrorism.

Do they think if we destroy our freedoms for the terrorists they will no longer have a reason to attack us?

In our efforts to battle terrorism and cyber attacks and biological weapons, all of us must be extremely aggressive. We must protect our people from danger and keep America safe and free.

This is... one of the great tragedies of the Bush administration. The more successful they’ve been at intercepting and stopping bad guys, the less proof there is that we’re in danger... it’s almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us.

When you have war, whether it's a war against drugs, war against terrorism, war overseas, the mentality of the people change and they're more willing to sacrifice their liberties in order to be safe and secure.

How could any responsible leader have ignored the Iraqi threat? If we had not acted, Saddam Hussein and his sons would still be in power.

This, in my view, is the highest responsibility of the President of the United States, which is to maintain the safety of the American people.