Richard Perle Quotes (38 Quotes)

These are lies, there is not a word of truth in them.

We should force European governments to choose between Paris and Washington.

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

But even a nation of laws must understand the limits of legalism. Between 1861 and 1865, the government of the United States took tens of thousands of American citizens prisoner and detained them for years without letting any one of them see a lawyer.

It's Saddam Hussein's style of justice, and it's appalling.

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

President Chirac has said Saddam Hussein was his friend -- a friend, one of the most brutal dictators in this world

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.

To stop terrorists before the strike, we must do three things: deny them entry into the country, curtail their freedom of action inside the country, and deprive them of material and moral support from within the country.

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

The CIA is blinded, too, by the squeamishness that many liberal-minded people feel about noticing the dark side of third world cultures.

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.

After 911, there was an awakening. The administration has to believe that it's possible to wait too long to deal with a problem, the contours of which could have been seen easily before. Is it safe to do that again.

In the Middle East, democratization does not mean calling immediate elections and then living with whatever happens next.

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

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

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.

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.

The committee almost never met, and when it deliberated it was usually at a fairly low bureaucratic level, I think it's a bit of a joke.

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

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

In any event, the problem in Iran is much bigger than weapons. The problem is the terrorist regime that seeks the weapons. The regime must go.

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.

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

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

The problem is the message, ... The message is confused and inconsistent. It posits a problem, but does not provide a convincing solution. Only if the problem and the solution are in balance can they hope to convince a skeptical public.

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.

He is bound and determined to show the world, and in particular his immediate neighbors, that he has outlasted the United States, he has outmaneuvered the United States, he has outfoxed us, and he is ruling Iraq as he did before the Gulf War. The victory of the Gulf War has all but been obliterated and erased by a failure to confront him early and effectively,

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.

The attack would be over before anybody knew what had happened.

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.

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

National sovereignty is an obligation as well as an entitlement. A government that will not perform the role of a government forfeits the rights of a government.

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

a formal warning that the agency's enforcement staff has determined that evidence of wrongdoing is sufficient to bring a civil lawsuit.

I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing.

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.

We can train Iraqi soldiers to combat insurgencies while respecting human rights, as we have trained armies in the Philippines and Latin America.