Top 102 Quotes & Sayings by Pete Hoekstra

After the heavily politicized 2007 Iran NIE, many of us in Congress found it hard to take some intelligence analysis at face value.

Illicit weapons have always been available to those who can afford them, but they have not generally been the latest state-of-the-art equipment, which requires experience and expertise to use.

The danger of having the military take over intelligence is that the military has a very different perspective on the world.

Obama's 'reset' with Russia and 'pivot' to Asia never materialized.

We need to recognize the reality of the threat from radical Islam: that it will be an enduring conflict, that there are no easy decisions, and that mistakes have and will be made.

Real leadership is leaders recognizing that they serve the people that they lead.

Obama sought a strategy of accommodating our enemies, even if they weren't so willing to accommodate us.

I've got a lot of respect for Mike Hayden.

The U.S. cannot survive another four years of the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton regime.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan harbor incredible promise for America once they forge an effective partnership.

The Panetta/Petraeus combo is a powerful tandem. I've seen both of them up close and personal at the CIA and in Iraq.

I think cleaning house at the CIA needed to happen.

It seems that whenever America faced a challenge, it faced it and overcame it.

Western Europe has been redefining the nation state since 1945 when it formed the European Union following World War II.

Obamacare became the disaster that its detractors always said that it would become.

Sports are trivial compared to matters of war and peace, but some parallels apply.

Briefly after the 9/11 attacks, Republicans and Democrats were united in identifying the evil of the radical jihadists and fighting it.

Islamists and their sympathizers hate us, and they will not stop hating us until we convert to ancient Islam. There is no middle ground or accommodation.

Gadhafi opponents included many 'good guys,' but they never received the support necessary to govern a new Libya after he was gone.

Accepting Syrian refugees into the United States is an emotional issue.

The fact is that no foreign-policy doctrine is perfect.

Clinton appears to be the sole holdout in the Obama administration in understanding the catastrophe caused by its foreign policy in Libya.

While the primary focus continues to be on religious minorities - the Christian religious minorities and the Jewish community - ISIS will also go after people who interpret and believe the Muslim faith differently than they do.

The anniversary of the tragic attacks on September 11, 2001, and September 11, 2012, is a day to remember those who died and suffered. It is also an opportunity to open a new dialogue on the tactics and strategies that have been successful - and unsuccessful - in confronting, containing, and defeating the threat from radical Islam.

Where the West has intervened in African domestic affairs, such as it did in Libya 2011, the country became a cradle of extremism that exports weapons, jihadists, and ideology to the rest of Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.

Good governance requires working toward common ground. It isn't easy.

An issue that really concerned me when I was on the House Intelligence Committee was the quality of analysis.

I'm not OK with clergy, students, and those of different opinions chanting and swearing, but it is their constitutional right.

I'm not OK with clergy, students, and those of different opinions lying and expressing hateful speech in the name of love, but again, it is their constitutional right. I'm not OK with their conduct, but in America we tolerate it, as obnoxious and spiteful as it may be.

Foreign policy is painstakingly difficult, and if there is to be anything gained from the experience in Libya, it is how not to conduct world affairs.

We can find common ground in agreeing that politics have no room in foreign policy.

The Islamic State has proven that terrorists can seize and deploy modern military equipment on lesser-armed opponents.

The world has devolved into a much more hardened and lethal place since that devastating September morning when Islamists assassinated nearly 3,000 Americans in the worst terror attack on U.S. soil.

Succeeding against an army of strawmen might feel good as a speech, but in reality, the world is filled with extraordinarily difficult challenges and very real consequences as a result of how we face them.

Islamic fundamentalists in dark areas of Libya rifled through leftover stockpiles of conventional, chemical, and biological munitions from Muammar Gaddafi's rule. Who knows where they are now?

The Eurozone allows for the largely unimpeded movement of people, goods, services, and capital across borders. It has also resulted in unprecedented cooperation on crime, security, and finance among its members.

A real possibility exists that we will be forced to confront, contain, and ultimately defeat radicalism and al-Qaeda alone, or at least with far fewer allies in the region than we had before.

The need to remove Col. Qaddafi should be self-evident.

Boko Haram, by itself, has destroyed large areas in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger.

A wounded Qaddafi still in power would be an ongoing threat and menace to the rest of the world.

Europe and the United States are better off extending a helping hand to those who know best rather than dictating to them an unfamiliar future.

Radical jihadists hate Americans for who we are. They cannot be managed. They cannot be trusted. Engaging them is a tragic fool's errand. We need to realize that they are at war with us and that we cannot control their motivations. We instead need to confront them, contain them, and ultimately defeat them before they defeat us.

World leaders need to approach the problems in the Middle East and northern Africa with imaginative ideas such as those that created the E.U.

Once the U.S. and NATO walked away from Libya, a chaotic, lawless state in the soft underbelly of Europe arose.

Libya became a rat's nest of extremism after NATO helped depose dictator Moammar Gadhafi, and it now exports weapons, jihadists, and ideology to Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

From my experience as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, if a congressperson is identified as a potential target by a foreign intelligence service, that individual is notified.

The U.S. might have diminished al-Qaeda's capabilities in the border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but it has not diminished the threat from radical Islamist terrorists as a whole.

Both Presidents George Bush and Barack Obama pursued policies of regime change after 9/11 - with Bush removing al-Qaida's safe haven in Afghanistan and the sadistic anti-American dictator Saddam Hussein in Iraq - but Obama took it a step further and disregarded regional stability as a guiding factor for U.S. policy.

The unregulated migration of hundreds of thousands of refugees from terrorist safe havens in Syria, Iraq, and Libya has created a very difficult threat environment for Europe.

ISIS has stated that it intends to infiltrate the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing the barbaric ISIS terrorists, using their families as cover.

The primary role of government is to provide for the safety and security of their populations.

America has historically met the challenges to its national security with decisive actions that defeated or, at a minimum, contained the threat.

America, at its core, is a country of strong and resilient people who are prepared to confront the challenges posed by those who seek to do us harm.

The U.S. faces a very dangerous sprint by outlaws to gather the deadliest weapons and technology on the planet, something we always thought possible but hoped would never occur.

The West needs leaders with the courage and the will to fight the scourge of radical Islam.

Consumer accountability drives quality and efficiency.

Libya is a huge disaster.

ISIS filled the vacuum in Iraq and Syria created by a lack of effective governance.

Just as sports teams recognize the potentially game-changing benefit of calling time-outs, failing to do so in matters of warfare is a surefire way to continue losing.

Not once during Obama's tenure did the country achieve an annual 3 percent rate of economic growth.