Quotes from Michael Mullen

The sea is my business.

I would like America to remember those who have served and those that we've lost and their families.

We are vulnerable in the military and in our governments, but I think we're most vulnerable to cyber attacks commercially. This challenge is going to significantly increase. It's not going to go away.

The best day was when we got bin Laden.

I think that is a noble goal that all of us should seek, to end wars and prevent wars as much as possible.

I'm not a policy and a strategy guy. I'm - you know, the military basically supports what the president wants, the decisions that he makes.

I'm very concerned about the nuclear weapons development for Iran and the destabilizing influence it has and they have in that part of the world. And I strongly endorse continued pressure, diplomatically, financially, economically.

My job is simply to give advice, to be a counselor to our nation's leaders.

Basically, we've grown up very focused on the institution. The institution tells me what to do. It tells me where to go. It tells me what my career path is, and then I, sort of, attach my own personal desires, my own personal interests. I think we're living in a time where we're going to have to change - to put people in the center.

I think the central mission in Afghanistan right now is to protect the people, certainly, and that would be inclusive of everybody, and that in a, in an insurgency and a counterinsurgency, that's really the center of gravity.

Too often we just look at these glistening successes. Behind them in many, many cases is failure along the way, and that doesn't get put into the Wikipedia story or the bio. Yet those failures teach you every bit as much as the successes.

Right now we're on the President Obama plan, and we'll stay with that. And from my perspective, the reason we're there is to make sure that we can achieve the principal goal which is ensure that Afghanistan can never become a safe haven for a terrorist organization like al Qaeda.

Don't try to run your life through a single straw. Someone, some event, will cut it off.

The single biggest existential threat that's out there, I think, is cyber.

I've been pretty clear about saying that I think that the No. 1 threat to our national security is our debt. And we've got to get our arms around that and head it in another - head it in the right direction - that we have to pay our fair share of this.

I was in the military for over 40 years, and one of the principles I kept with me was that there's an expectation globally that the U.S. will lead. Questions about that expectation have certainly risen in recent years. The fact that there's even a question about that is worrisome to me, and I think needs to be for a lot of people.

I've said for a long time, clearly the - a, a critical key to success in the region is going to be Pakistan and our relationship with Pakistan, which was one that was broken in the late '80s and which we've worked hard to restore.

Our training is world-class across all the services. We spend an awful lot on every soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, Coast Guardsman that comes in, and we ask them to do an awful lot, sometimes more than we expect of ourselves, and they do that.

Some 70% to 80% of all who join the military will return to the civilian workforce. They'll return to communities, and one of the things I've worried about is the increasing disconnect between the American people and our men and women in uniform. We come from fewer and fewer places. We're less than 1% of the population.

One of the reasons that I'm still in the military - or I stayed in the military - is because I think the military has been a place where certainly people could improve, advance, and were treated fairly.

It is my position that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do. No matter how I look at this issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.

In every war at some point in time, you do sit down and negotiate.

I think anybody in our - in the, in the national security apparatus has, has got to take full cognizance of their responsibility for the safeguarding of classified information.

Let us all be men and women in full. Let us expect from ourselves more than we think we can give, more than we think we can do and more than we think we already know.