Firing off 1,000 or 500 or 2,000 nuclear warheads on a few minutes' consideration has always struck me as an absurd way to go to war.

To say that you now trust the Russian military command and control system because some Russian general told you from the bottom of his heart that's the case, strikes me as most unrealistic.

I have never belonged to a party. I don't have party affiliation.

I remember serving in Vietnam in that war, and many of us at the major Lieutenant Colonel, colonel level were frustrated that no one in the U.S. wanted to debate it that way.

So the idea that you could put Kurds, Shiite Arabs, and Sunni Arabs in a nice, liberal, federal system in Iraq in a short amount of time, six months or a year, boggles the mind.

In World War II in Germany, we had a ration for one U.S. soldier, or one allied soldier for every twenty inhabitants. The ratio in Iraq is about one for a hundred and sixty.

Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of parliament have closed a few.

Military officers from different countries, when they meet each other, tend to sort of fall in love, become mutual admiration societies, at the expense of realities.

The whole notion of land property rights in the Arab world is different from that in Europe.

Second, recent polls over there show that the majority of Iraqis want us to leave precipitously.

I will make a general statement that we have not had anything like the policy of holding people in high office responsible for their acts that I think we should.

Sometimes religion gets in the way of God.

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Democracy means government by the uneducated while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

For millions of Christians, nevertheless, God is no more real than He is to the non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle.

The ambitions we have will become the stories we live.

All I can do is try to create my own brand and have people appreciate me for that.

Education in the understanding of citizenship is a short-term affair if we are honest and earnest.

I'd rather we were rebuilding Philadelphia, as opposed to Kabul...There are American cities with serious infrastructure problems and we're not addressing them.

...a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.

I'd rather be on this side of the camera. I feel more comfortable. I'd rather keep myself centered and keep my ego as tepid as possible. Because you can get a big head walking around here.