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The commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong, unless proved otherwise.

Colin Powell

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Colin Powell
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: April 5
Diplomat
Former United States Secretary Of State
Politician
Soldier
New York City
New York
Colin Luther Powell
Field
Fields
Leadership
Echelon
Unless
Rear
Wrong
Commander
Right
Commanders
Always
Proved
Otherwise

More quotes by Colin Powell

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That's why the army sends all its future generals to what we call charm school. As soon as you are a general, people think that you know everything. You think yourself that you have become omniscient and omnipotent. Be careful, because people want to do everything they can to please the general, and you need to guard against this.
Colin Powell
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Even the greatest of all strategists must occasionally take into account the presence of an enemy.
Colin Powell
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The less you associate with some people, the more your life will improve. Any time you tolerate mediocrity in others, it increases your mediocrity. An important attribute in successful people is their impatience with negative thinking and negative acting people.
Colin Powell
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It's nice to say let's be bipartisan. But we're a partisan nation. We were raised as a partisan nation.
Colin Powell
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Preferring members of any one group for no reason other than race or ethnic origin is discrimination for its own sake. This the Constitution forbids.
Colin Powell
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Generally you should act somewhere between P40 and P70, as I call it. Sometime after you have obtained 40 percent of all the information you are liable to get, start thinking in terms of making a decision. When you have about 70 percent of all the information, you probably ought to decide, because you may lose an opportunity in losing time.
Colin Powell
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We all hoped in 2001 that we could put in place an Afghan government under President Karzai that would be able to control the country, make sure al-Qaeda didn't come back, and make sure the Taliban wasn't resurging. It didn't work out.
Colin Powell
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Treat people kindly. When you are kind to somebody and I don't mean necessarily buddy-buddy, just show kindness and consideration. Show that people are worthy and you respect them and you are glad they're with you.
Colin Powell
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Politics is not bean bags. It's serious, tough stuff.
Colin Powell
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With respect to our friends in the [Iraq] region, each has its own system, each will have to make its own judgment as to whether it will change, how fast it will change, and we hope that we can help influence them as to how change comes about and what change might be better for them than other forms of change.
Colin Powell
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Give me the right people and I don’t much care what organization you give me. Good things will happen. Give me the wrong people and it doesn’t matter what you do with the organization. Bad things will happen.
Colin Powell
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Ladies and gentlemen, these are not assertions. These are facts, corroborated by many sources, some of them sources of the intelligence services of other countries.
Colin Powell
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I have the deepest regret about 9/11. Sept. 11, 2001, was one of the most difficult days I've ever had. I was in Lima, Peru, and had to fly back eight hours not knowing what happened in my own country, knowing thousands of my fellow citizens had died.
Colin Powell
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Let me blow that up for you again.
Colin Powell
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Today I can declare my hope and declare it from the bottom of my heart that we will eventually see the time when that number of nuclear weapons is down to zero and the world is a much better place.
Colin Powell
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Wouldn't it be great if we could look forward to a whole world in which no child will be left behind?
Colin Powell
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Organization charts and fancy titles count for next to nothing.
Colin Powell
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One important element of leadership is taking care of the troops.
Colin Powell
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I want to scare the hell out of the rest of the world.
Colin Powell
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The most effective means of ensuring the government's accountability to the people is an aggressive, free, challenging, untrusting press.
Colin Powell