Robert M. Gates Quotations

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.

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've spent my entire adult life with the United States as a superpower and one that had no compunction about spending what it took to sustain that position. And it didn't have to look over its shoulder because our economy was so strong.

I don't think any president that I worked with has ever said 'pretty please.

Defense is not like other discretionary spending.

Development is a lot cheaper than sending soldiers.

If there's ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience.

America's civilian institutions of diplomacy and development have been chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long.

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

I will always be an advocate in terms of wars of necessity. I am just much more cautious on wars of choice.