Quotes About Colin Powell

February 5, 2003, before the conflict began, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN he had absolute proof that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that were an immediate threat to world security. He declared: "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence . . . .

I think the Iranians are clearly determined to have a nuclear program. And we have to assume that with a nuclear program they have the capability and the will to create a nuclear weapon.

The first weekend after the attacks of September 11, George W. Bush had a meeting at Camp David with his top advisors, including Colin Powell, the secretary of state. And there was a lively debate about Iraq policy, in which some people from the Pentagon were arguing that the war against terrorism should include Saddam Hussein.

I just want to be really clear about this: Anyone who has read Colin Powell's biography - there's an entire section where he talks about experiencing segregation. Colin Powell did not appear when he became head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That's not how it happened.

The centerpiece of the Bush administration's case for going to war in Iraq was Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003, six weeks before the invasion.

I don't want to spend the rest of my life giving speeches.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, thank you so much, as always, for joining us this morning.

effort to rebuild American military power while restricting its use, initiated by Creighton Abrams and carried to its fruition by Colin Powell, failed.

President Assad, I worked with. I know him reasonably well, met with him a few times, and he's a liar.

I'm not active in politics. I vote as a citizen. And if somebody cares to know what my opinion is at the time of the election, I might or might not share it publicly.

It was the Congress that imposed 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' it was certainly my position, my recommendation to get us out of an even worse outcome that could have occurred.

Colin Powell has said over the years that Saddam Hussein is like a toothache. It recurs from time to time, and you just have to live with it. At other times, he's compared Saddam Hussein to a kidney stone that will eventually pass. But he has never said, 'You have to operate and take out the kidney stone.'

Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership. —Colin Powell

What we have to find is the right level of regulation of our financial system so that it has the incentive to invest in things, but at the same time, it is sufficiently regulated so it can't get in the kind of trouble that we have seen in the past and we have seen recently.

In the last several years, I have been troubled by the right shift of the Republican party too far to the right.

Policies that emanate from ivory towers often have an adverse impact on the people out in the field who are fighting the wars or bringing in the revenues.

This was the closest anybody in Iraq came to finding WMDs. Even though it was obvious to me and my staff that there was no way the vans could have produced biological weapons, a month after we got the photos, the CIA published a twenty-eight-page pamphlet insisting that was what they were for. …I was bewildered - Colin Powell

This is not about charity, it's about justice... The war against terror is bound up in the war against poverty - I didn't say that, Colin Powell said that . . .

Yup, the whole birther movement was racist.

During the election campaign of 2000, it was generally thought that then-governor Bush didn't know much about foreign policy or national security affairs, and that Colin Powell would lead on that front, while the president's main concern would be domestic.

My dad was stationed at the Pentagon when I was like middle-school age. He was support for the Joint Chiefs of Staff; his boss was Colin Powell.

In 2002 and 2003, the Bush administration decided against bombing Zarqawi's camp in northern Iraq because it might derail plans to depose Saddam Hussein. By focusing on Zarqawi in his speech at the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell inadvertently spread his fame throughout the Arab world.

In 2008, I spoke out against calling the president a Muslim as if that was a curse. And then in 2012, once again, I was very disturbed about some of the intolerance I was seeing in the party, so I made a statement saying there's a level of intolerance in some parts of the Republican Party. And there was, and I think there still is.

The struggle you see in the Republican Party today is the country club Republican versus the bowling alley Republican. Colin Powell brings us back to the country club image. He's an insider. He's a moderate.