Top 78 Quotes & Sayings by Robert M. Gates
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American politician Robert M. Gates.
Last updated on December 3, 2024.
Even when I was at CIA, I'd go to visit foreign leaders and I'd say, 'You know, I'm not a diplomat. I'm just an old CIA guy'... I said, 'If I wanted to be diplomatic, I'd have been a diplomat.'
I think that Iran with a nuclear weapon is extremely destabilizing. I think it could precipitate a nuclear arms race in the region.
I've been very sensitive for a long time to the repeated pattern, during economic hard times or after a war, of the United States' essentially unilaterally disarming.
I will always be an advocate in terms of wars of necessity. I am just much more cautious on wars of choice.
I had no concerns - I had no reason to have concerns based on what was available to me about North's contacts with the private sector people, but I didn't think a CIA person should do it.
There's a lot of books out there about how you lead change in business, but I've certainly not seen any... on how you do that in public institutions.
I wish I could set deadlines for the Congress, but that's just not the way the Constitution is written.
There is no international problem that can be addressed or solved without the engagement and leadership of the United States and everybody in the world knows that, its just fact of life. So sometimes I think we could conduct ourselves with a little more humility.
You know, if I were an - if I were a Taliban, I'd say, 'What did al-Qaida ever do for me except get me kicked out of Afghanistan?'
I read in the press, and therefore it must be true, that no secretary of defense had ever been quoted as arguing for a bigger budget for State.
No president is well-served by groupthink or by everybody singing from the same sheet of music they think he's on.
I had no difficulty as Secretary of Defense moving from the Bush administration to the Obama administration.
Well, I've ruffled a few feathers at all the institutions I've led. But I think that's part of leadership.
I'm a big advocate of drones.
Well, what I've said is that the war in Iraq will always be clouded by how it began, which was a wrong premise, that there were in fact no weapons of nuclear - weapons of mass destruction.
When I was the director of Central Intelligence in the early '90s, I tried to get the Air Force to partner with us in building drones. And they didn't want to, because they had no pilots.
I don't think any president that I worked with has ever said 'pretty please.'
If there's ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience.
A wild and crazy weekend involves sitting on the front porch, smoking a cigar, reading a book.
If Poindexter made a comment to me like that, it would have been in the context of once the authorized program is approved there would be no point in having any of these private benefactors any longer.
I consider myself a Republican.
I mean, when you get down to very low numbers of nuclear weapons, and you contemplate going to zero, how do you deal with the reality of that technology being available to almost any country that seeks to pursue it? And what conditions do you put in place?
I have tried to maintain civil relationships with everyone I meet - and, even if I violently disagree with them, try to be respectful.
The United States has been a global power since late in the 19th century.
Most governments lie to each other. That's the way business gets done.
Health care costs are eating the Defense Department alive.
Some people have said, in so many words, that I'm kind of wooly-headed in believing that the Iranians would see not having nuclear weapons as more in their security interest than not.
Defense is not like other discretionary spending.
One of my favorite little sayings is, 'To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.'
I've seen, all too often in my career, people coming in to lead agencies and organizations and trying to impose change from the top down. Never works. You never have enough time.
One of the big changes in the Congress since I first came to Washington is that all of these folks go home every weekend. They used to play golf together; their families got to know each other, go to dinner at each other's homes at weekends - and these would be people who were political adversaries.
I've spent my entire adult life with the United States as a superpower and one that had no compunction about spending what it took to sustain that position. And it didn't have to look over its shoulder because our economy was so strong.
I have always that there ought to be some kind of mandatory national service, not necessarily in the military but to show everybody that freedom isn't free, that everybody has an obligation to the nation as a community.
Things have gotten so nasty in Washington.
The reality is, the United States has global interests. Our defense budget is about the same as the defense budgets or military budgets of every other country in the world put together.
Well, Israel, obviously, thinks of the Iranian nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel.
I have always voted for who I believed was the best person.
If Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us anything in recent history, it is the unpredictability of war and that these things are easier to get into than to get out of, and, frankly, the facile way in which too many people talk about, 'Well, let's just go attack them.'
I have instincts.
I think Donald Trump has gotten China's attention to a degree that his predecessors have not that this is a very serious matter for the United States.
We should never lose sight of the ethos that has made the Marine Corps - where 'every Marine is a rifleman' - one of America's cherished institutions and one of the world's most feared and respected fighting forces
In government, I'm a strong believer in the need for reform of government agencies and departments. They - they have gotten fat and sloppy, and they're not user friendly. They are inefficient. They cost too much.
Development is a lot cheaper than sending soldiers.
If possible, to be in a position to announce who is going to step in as the interim immediately. And if possible, to announce who you're going to nominate to replace that person. For that to be somebody of impeccable integrity and reputation disarms a lot of the worst criticism that it's some kind of a power play. It's a professional approach to replacing a senior official, which is always going to get a lot of attention.
One of my favorite little sayings is, 'To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.
And so the greatest of American triumphs... became a peculiarly joyless victory. We had won the Cold War, but there would be no parades.
It has become clear that America's civilian institutions of diplomacy and development have been chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long - relative to what we spend on the military, and more important, relative to the responsibilities and challenges our nation has around the world.
What I know concerns me. What I don't know concerns me even more. What people aren't telling me worries me the most.
Congress is best viewed from a distance - the farther the better - because up close, it is truly ugly.
There will be boots on the ground if there's to be any hope of success in the strategy.
Congress is best viewed from a distance—the farther the better—because up close, it is truly ugly. I saw most of Congress as uncivil, incompetent at fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned and prone to put self (and re-election) before country.
No policy has proved more successful in making friends for the United States, during the cold war and since, than educating students from abroad at our colleges and universities.
I think in the context of senior government positions, I think an anecdote of what I told President-Elect Barack Obama when we had our first meeting. And I said, "You don't know me. Can you trust me? Why do you think you can trust me?" and so on. But at the end, I said, "You can count on me to be loyal to you. I will not leak. I will keep my disagreements with you private. And if I cannot be loyal, I'll leave." Loyalty means doing what you think is in the best interest of that person as well as the country.
One of the toughest battles in intelligence is combating conventional wisdom.
Future U.S. political leaders – those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me – may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.
Often, loyalty means telling people things they don't want to hear. It's not being sycophantic, it's not telling them how wonderful they are every day. It's being willing to tell them the days they're not wonderful.
I think, on the foreign policy side, that there is a need for disruption. We've had three administrations follow a pretty consistent policy toward North Korea, and it really hasn't gotten us anywhere.
America's civilian institutions of diplomacy and development have been chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long.
If Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us anything in recent history, it is the unpredictability of war and that these things are easier to get into than to get out of, and, frankly, the facile way in which too many people talk about, 'Well, let's just go attack them.
In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it.
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