George W. Bush Quotes

I would say national security is work in progress.

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.

For the vast majority of places in America, there is no way you can build a security system such as we have here because of the high priority this rates in terms of terrorist interests.

Once the attacks occur, as we learned on Sept. 11, it is too late. It makes little sense to deprive ourselves of an important, and legal, means to detect and prevent terrorist attacks while we are still in the middle of a fight to the death with al Qaeda.

Despite constant vilifying by the media and congressional threats to take away the tools needed to uncover plots, FBI agents and CIA officers work silently around the clock and risk their own lives to keep us safe.

Since the tragedies, the Department of Homeland Security was established to prevent terrorist attacks within the United States, and most importantly, to share intelligence information among government agencies and departments.

Fighting terrorists does not require half a trillion dollars worth of conventional and nuclear forces.

How many terrorist attacks has TSA thwarted? We're never going to know the true answer to that question.

Michael Chertoff and the Department of Homeland Security, they have the primary responsibility of ensuring that our ports are secure.

Security has to be, and has long been, our government's top priority. It is imperative that we continue to diligently watch for potential threats by all appropriate means.

One of our pillars has to be national security - our nation's security both domestically and abroad.

It has been clear for some time now that we have to do more for domestic and external security. I am prepared for that.

My central focus is what are we doing to protect the American people and the American homeland? Afghanistan and Pakistan are critical elements in that process.

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.

Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind set if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we're not really at war. I think that would be a terrible mistake for us.

I'm telling you there's an enemy that would like to attack America, Americans, again. There just is. That's the reality of the world. And I wish him all the very best.

For anybody here who's very worried about domestic priorities, just consider we have created, with this war on terrorism, more fighters, more countries embroiled. They're learning new weapons. They're learning new techniques. They're coming here in social media. The lone wolf thing is expanding. And once that blows here, then forget about domestic priorities.

I will take a backseat to no one in keeping America safe. I have a very clear set of proposals about how we defeat ISIS.

The terrorist attacks on September the 11th were a turning point for our nation. We saw the goals of a determined enemy to expand the scale of their murder and force America to retreat from the world. And our nation accepted a mission. We will defeat this enemy. The United States of America is determined to guard our homeland against future attacks. As the September 11th Commission concluded, our country is safer than we were three years ago, but we are not yet safe

The terrorists do not understand America. The American people do not falter under threat, and we will not allow our future to be determined by car bombers and assassins.

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.

No one ever said that fighting the war against terrorism and defending our homeland would be easy. So let's support our troops, law enforcement workers, and our mission to keep our nation and our children safe in the days and years to come.

I believe when the country feels threatened it is important that we are seen to be working together to find an appropriate structure for dealing with terrorists in our midst.

After the horrific attacks of September 11th, it was evident that our Government needed to be transformed to meet the new challenges of this dangerous world.

If the Pentagon truly confined itself to providing defense, then presumably we wouldn't need a whole separate government agency to provide 'Homeland Security.'