732 Quotes by Donald Rumsfeld

One always tries to help those that are grieving understand the importance of what their sons and daughters have been doing.

If a person is determined to fight to the death, then they may very well have that opportunity.

We have to obey the laws with respect to security classifications,

Absent a dictator, absent the Saddam Hussein regime, our goal would be first to have a single country, not have a country broken up into pieces, it would be to see that it would be a country without weapons of mass destruction, a country that did not try to impose its will upon its neighbors and it was a country that was respectful of the rights of minorities and the ethnic groups that exist in the country,

We wanted to be here and meet with the senior leadership in this country because we value their advice, we value their counsel and we recognize that this is a campaign, a war, a battle against a problem that crosses the globe,

Our task, your task... is to try to connect the dots before something happens. People say, 'Well, where's the smoking gun?' Well, we don't want to see a smoking gun from a weapon of mass destruction.

One would assume days, not weeks or months, ... I'd be reluctant to be any more precise than that.

All the instructions I issued required humane treatment, ... Anything that was done that was not humane has been prosecuted.

It is worth reminding that being president is a tough job for anybody, and particularly so in the information age. There's such a glut of information. Anything a president says or does is picked up on the Internet or the 24/7 news media and criticized almost instantly. Leaders persuade through their words and as such their words need to be measured and well chosen. It is a tough job.