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What I know concerns me. What I don't know concerns me even more. What people aren't telling me worries me the most.

Robert M. Gates

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Robert M. Gates
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 25
Air Force Officer
Politician
Wichita
Kansas
Robert Michael Gates
Worry
Even
Life
People
Worries
Concerns
Telling
Concern
Aren

More quotes by Robert M. Gates

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One of the toughest battles in intelligence is combating conventional wisdom.
Robert M. Gates
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Congress is best viewed from a distance - the farther the better - because up close, it is truly ugly.
Robert M. Gates
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In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it.
Robert M. Gates
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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.
Robert M. Gates
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Well, what I've said is that the war in Iraq will always be clouded by how it began, which was a wrong premise, that there were in fact no weapons of nuclear - weapons of mass destruction.
Robert M. Gates
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The reality is, the United States has global interests. Our defense budget is about the same as the defense budgets or military budgets of every other country in the world put together.
Robert M. Gates
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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.
Robert M. Gates
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I have tried to maintain civil relationships with everyone I meet - and, even if I violently disagree with them, try to be respectful.
Robert M. Gates
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I'm a big advocate of drones.
Robert M. Gates
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No president is well-served by groupthink or by everybody singing from the same sheet of music they think he's on.
Robert M. Gates
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Soviet foreign ministers would come in to see the president all the time, routinely. Jimmy Carter stopped that after the invasion of Afghanistan. Ronald Reagan resumed it in 1984, I think. And so the fact of a meeting like that I think is not that big a deal.
Robert M. Gates
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And so the greatest of American triumphs... became a peculiarly joyless victory. We had won the Cold War, but there would be no parades.
Robert M. Gates
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Some people have said, in so many words, that I'm kind of wooly-headed in believing that the Iranians would see not having nuclear weapons as more in their security interest than not.
Robert M. Gates
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A wild and crazy weekend involves sitting on the front porch, smoking a cigar, reading a book.
Robert M. Gates
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Even when I was at CIA, I'd go to visit foreign leaders and I'd say, 'You know, I'm not a diplomat. I'm just an old CIA guy'... I said, 'If I wanted to be diplomatic, I'd have been a diplomat.'
Robert M. Gates
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If there's ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience.
Robert M. Gates
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If Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us anything in recent history, it is the unpredictability of war and that these things are easier to get into than to get out of, and, frankly, the facile way in which too many people talk about, 'Well, let's just go attack them.
Robert M. Gates
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I think Donald Trump has gotten China's attention to a degree that his predecessors have not that this is a very serious matter for the United States.
Robert M. Gates
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I consider myself a Republican.
Robert M. Gates
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One of the big changes in the Congress since I first came to Washington is that all of these folks go home every weekend. They used to play golf together their families got to know each other, go to dinner at each other's homes at weekends - and these would be people who were political adversaries.
Robert M. Gates