Top 76 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Wolfowitz

We don't start a job that we can't finish... that's the American way.

The American people are pretty impressive in their ability to keep after something if they think it is doable.

I've met quite a few dictators up close and personal in my life.

China, in the future, is going to have even more nuclear capability than it has had in the past. I don't believe that they have anything to fear from the United States, and I frankly don't believe they do fear the United States.

Support for peaceful reform by the people themselves is the right way to promote democracy, not the use of force.

For the private sector to flourish, special privilege must give way to equal opportunity and equal risk for all.

I'm not sure the oil producers are enjoying real growth. That troubles me. For experience has shown that oil can be more of a curse than a blessing. And not only in Africa.

The internal affairs of other countries has a big impact on American interests.

I mean, we're going to probably debate the Iraq war for at least as long as I'm alive.

That sense of what happened in Europe in World War II has shaped a lot of my views.

We did not go to war in Afghanistan or in Iraq to, quote, 'impose democracy.' We went to war in both places because we saw those regimes as a threat to the United States.

Poles understand perhaps better than anyone the consequences of making toothless warnings to brutal tyrants and terrorist regimes.

Sometimes corruption is slowed by shedding light into what was previously shadowed.

One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war.

I think, in the longer view of things, there is a very powerful pull in the direction of participatory government.

Generally speaking, the stronger the connection between the financing and the ultimate beneficiary, the better the result.

I told my father I had to try political science for a year. He thought I was throwing my life away.

I'm constantly asking for alternative views on most things that come to me.

You can't be involved in healthcare without being involved in the battle against AIDS.

Someone once said that history has more imagination than all the scenario writers in the Pentagon, and we have a lot of scenario writers here. No one ever wrote a scenario for commercial airliners crashing into the World Trade Center.

You can't win if you're chasing the wrong problem.

No one argues that we should have imposed a dictatorship in Afghanistan having liberated the country. Similarly, we weren't about to impose a dictatorship in Iraq having liberated the country.

Look, I think the public generally understands that what's at stake in Afghanistan is American security, number one.

The use of force to liberate people is very different from the use of force to suppress or control them, or even to defeat them.

I think one has to say it's not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism. And that's why it has to be a broad and sustained campaign.

Democracy is a process.

Jobs are a priority for every country. Doing more to improve regulation and help entrepreneurs is the key to creating jobs - and more growth.

The most striking thing is that even before Osama bin Laden was killed, he seemed largely irrelevant to the Arab Spring.

The cost of the high-cost economy remains too high.

If greater openness is a key to economic success, I believe there is increasingly a need for openness in the political sphere as well.

I think that all countries that participate in multilateral institutions see the institutions as a way of advancing what they view as their national interests and they see in many cases multi-lateral institution as the best way to do that.

I certainly don't like a label that suggests I believe that the military is the solution to most of the world's problems.

For one thing I tend not to see myself in various moulds that people fit me into.

I think it's a mistake to rely too much on any one economic factor. It's why investors try to spread their portfolio round.

I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq. Those who want to come and help are welcome. Those who come to interfere and destroy are not.

Before September 11, terrorism was viewed as something ugly but you lived with it.

Public action should seek to expand the set of opportunities of those who have the least voice and fewest resources and capabilities.

It's wonderful that so many people want to contribute to fighting aids or malaria. But, if somebody isn't paying attention to the overall health system in the country, a whole lot of money can be wasted.

Look, I think the notion that there's a dogma or doctrine of foreign policy that gives you a textbook recipe for how to react to all situations is really nonsense.

I like globalization; I want to say it works, but it is hard to say that when six hundred million people are slipping backwards.

History is just littered with problems that were solved that were supposed to be impossible.

It is kind of nice to have a common purpose.

Part of what is wrong with the view of American imperialism is that it is antithetical to our interests. We are better off when people are governing themselves. I'm sure there is some guy that will tell you that philosophy is no different from the Roman Empire's. Well, it is fundamentally different.

I have always had a tendency to keep enlarging problems which I personally think is the way the world works... that seeing anything one dimensionally on the kinds of political, sort of big issues of human progress is going to be a distorted view of things, which is why over my career I have gone seemingly from subject to subject to subject.

The absence of Saddam is a huge weight off the Arab world.

It's a very bad thing when people exterminate other people, and people persecute minorities.

To stay back from an intervention is not always a good solution.

There's a lot of money to pay for this ... the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years...We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.

People change their habits. I know Americans who don't go to Paris because they think it is too dangerous.

I certainly think it's important to speak up and say how unacceptable Donald Trump is. I'm always more than willing to do that.

Saddam Hussein had nerve gas and used it against his own people, he had used chemical weapons against the Iranians and he almost had a nuclear bomb in 1981 and in 1991. And he had been caught with anthrax in 1995 by the UN inspections after denying that he had it.

Firing employees, that's unfortunately part of doing business.

It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.

I don't know of a single instance of these Arab freedom fighters holding up pictures of bin Laden. I know many instances of them displaying American flags in Benghazi or painting 'Facebook' on their foreheads in Cairo. The idea of freedom . . . is absolutely contradictory to what bin Laden stood for, which was . . . taking Muslims back to some medieval theocracy and encouraging people to die not for freedom but to go to paradise and to kill innocent people along the way. The contrast is really striking.

It would be a huge mistake to abandon democracy promotion. Peaceful political change has been enormously successful in the past years in Eastern European countries as well as in countries like South Korea, South Africa, Chile and Indonesia. However, if possible, the use of force is something to avoid except in cases where genocide is threatened, like Bosnia or Libya or with regimes that threaten our security, like the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.

If a cat sits on a hot stove once, it will never sit on a cold one either.

NATO is still the most remarkable alliance in history. It stuck together through 40 years of Cold War, and it then joined together to fight in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, I would not have thought this was going to be possible.

I wish there were somebody I could be comfortable voting for. I might have to vote for Hillary Clinton, even though I have big reservations about her.

Iraq has no history of ethnic conflict.

We are already seeing a degree of instability in the world because Obama seems to have consciously wanted to step back. Donald Trump is going to be "Obama squared," a more extreme version of the same thing.