33 Richard Perle Quotes

Richard Perle quotes

1. 'Iraq is a very wealthy country. Enourmous oil reserves. They can finance, largely finance the reconstruction of their own country. And I have no doubt they will.'

2. 'I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing.' (2003)

3. 'And a year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they've been liberated. And it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense of liberation.'

4. Sometimes the things we have to do are objectionable in the eyes of others.

5. I've never thought much of Joe Nye's writings on soft power.

6. Dictators must have enemies. They must have internal enemies to justify their secret police and external enemies to justify their military forces.

7. I really don't have a solution. Except to say that a precondition for any solution must be a recognition on the part of all parties on the legitimacy of all parties. That is you cannot build a political agreement on the premise that a Jewish state in Palestine is illegitimate.

8. I think there is a potential civic culture in Arab countries that can lead to democratic institutions and I think Iraq is probably the best place to put that proposition to the test

9. Well, you're going to find a disproportionate number of Jews in any sort of intellectual undertaking.

10. The programme of the British Labour Party under Neil Kinnock is so wildly irresponsible, so separate and apart from the historic NATO strategy, that I think a Labour government that stood by its present policies-and I rather doubt that they would-would, if it didn't destroy the Alliance, at least diminish its effective ability to do the task for which it was created.

11. About George W. Bush: 'He came ill-equipped for the job and has failed to master it.'

1. Law-abiding citizens value privacy. Terrorists require invisibility. The two are not the same, and they should not be confused.

2. The jealousy and resentment that animate the terrorists also affect many of our former cold war allies.

3. Few governments in the world, for example, praise human rights more ardently than does the government of France, and few have a worse record of supporting tyrants and killers.

4. No one is talking about occupying Iraq for five to ten years.

5. Acknowledge that a more closely integrated Europe is no longer an unqualified American interest.

6. Non-citizen terrorist suspects are not members of the American national community, and they have no proper claim on the rights Americans accord one another.

7. Nor should we exclude the possibility that Islamic terrorism may begin to make common cause with Western political extremists of the far Left and far Right.

8. The lax multiculturalism that urges Americans to accept the unacceptable from their fellow citizens is one of this nation's greatest vulnerabilities in the war on terror.

9. In time, all of Korea will be united in liberty.

10. Right now, American law bars the admission of aliens suspected of terrorist activity - but not of terrorist sympathies.

11. Support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse after the first whiff of gunpowder.

12. The same European governments that hesitated to confront terrorists were more than prepared to oppose us.

13. For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation’s great cause … There is no middle way for Americans: it is victory or holocaust.

14. George Tenet has been the director of central intelligence since 1997, time enough to have changed the Agency's culture. He has failed. He should go.

15. Dictatorships start wars because they need external enemies to exert internal control over their own people.

16. We may be so eager to protect the right to dissent that we lose sight of the difference between dissent and subversion.

17. No operational commander should have to assign a soldier a task that could be done as well by a computer, a remote sensor, or an unmanned airplane.

18. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now.

19. I think we have an administration today that is dysfunctional. And if it can't get itself together to organize a serious program for finding nuclear material on its way to the United States, then it ought to be replaced by an administration that can.

20. Even now, the irony that so non-intellectual a man should choose to engage the Soviet Union on the battlefield of ideas has eluded most commentators and historians.

21. But if the UN cannot or will not revise its rules in ways that establish beyond question the legality of the measures the United States must take to protect the American people, then we should unashamedly and explicitly reject the jurisdiction of these rules.

22. We must do our utmost to preserve our British ally's strategic independence from Europe.