Michael Chertoff Quotes on People (11 Quotes)

When we remove the water from New Orleans, we're going to uncover people who died hiding in houses, who got caught by the flood, people whose remains will be found in the street, ... It is going to be about as ugly a scene as you can imagine.

It would be enormously difficult if we were to attempt to control illegal immigration at the border without having some legal avenue to address the fact that there is a high demand for non-U.S. people to come in and perform certain kinds of jobs,

You've got to make sure you've built the entire system so that once you apprehend people, you can hold them and then remove them in a prompt way.

I think we need to prepare the country for what's coming, ... What's going to happen when we de-water and remove the water from New Orleans is we're going to uncover people who died, maybe hiding in houses, got caught by the flood, people whose remains are going to be found in the streets. ... It is going to be about as ugly of a scene as I think you can imagine.

I knew I became more involved in operational matters than I would normally expect to be or want to be, given the fact that I had a battlefield commander on the ground, ... I am not a hurricane expert. I've got to rely on people to execute the details of the plan.

The truth of the matter is, a fully loaded airplane with jet fuel, a commercial airliner, has the capacity to kill 3,000 people. A bomb in a subway car may kill 30 people. When you start to think about your priorities, you're going to think about making sure you don't have a catastrophic thing first.

People have got to take some responsibility for preparing themselves, ... That means you get yourself three days' worth of food, three days' worth of water you get yourself flashlights, batteries, either a hand-crank radio or a battery-powered radio, a first-aid kit precisely because you know it's going to take 48 to 72 hours to be able to fully service everyone.

What I said was not that we didn't anticipate that there's a possibility the levees will break. What I said was, in this storm, what happened is, the storm passed and passed without the levees breaking on Monday. Tuesday morning, I opened newspapers and saw headlines that said 'New Orleans Dodged the Bullet,' which surprised people. What surprised them was that the levee broke overnight and the next day and, in fact, collapsed. That was a surprise.

I'm kind of amazed you can write a report in which you reach your conclusions before you actually speak to the people who were involved in the decision-making process. It's kind of jumping to conclusions before the facts were gathered.

I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water.

Obviously, people feel strongly about their home communities and they tend to see their own risks to the exclusion of others. Our job is to balance.