276 Quotes by Michael Chertoff

And here where the fact that we've given over half a billion dollars to New York really plays a role, because New York has already made a lot of investments in the kinds of things which you'd expect to have as basic security.

I still don't have the full story about why some things weren't moving, and I look forward to having the answer to that,

I think that that predication unhappily turned out to be correct and one of the things I said was we're racing the clock. Unfortunately, the hurricane beat us,

And if we make the process political, if we start to make it personal, we're actually going to frustrate good public policy, in terms of managing this money.

I understand there are frustrations here, ... As the governor has acknowledged, we can't always get to people what we hope to get and as quickly as we hope to do it.

The lesson is that when the storm hits, the best place to be is to be out of the path of the storm, ... There's plenty of notice about Rita.

I think that was a bad idea, and I directed it not to happen again,

The whole point of this program is let people decide the fate of their own lives, ... And I think that avoids the whole issue of someone coming from outside and saying, 'You must do this' or 'You must do that.'

Last year, New York got $200 million. This year, we're going to give them $124 million under this particular program. But last year was an artificially elevated number to make up from the very low grant the year before.