Quotes from Robert M. Gates

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.

A wild and crazy weekend involves sitting on the front porch, smoking a cigar, reading a book.

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.

Well, Israel, obviously, thinks of the Iranian nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel.

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.

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.

Well, I've ruffled a few feathers at all the institutions I've led. But I think that's part of leadership.

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.

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?

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'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.

One of the toughest battles in intelligence is combating conventional wisdom.

Defense is not like other discretionary spending.

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.

I had no difficulty as Secretary of Defense moving from the Bush administration to the Obama administration.

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 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.

I'm a big advocate of drones.

I have tried to maintain civil relationships with everyone I meet - and, even if I violently disagree with them, try to be respectful.