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" You know, if I were an - if I were a Taliban, I'd say, 'What did al-Qaida ever do for me except get me kicked out of Afghanistan?' "

Robert M. Gates

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

Robert M. Gates

" 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

" 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

" 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

" Things have gotten so nasty in Washington. "

Robert M. Gates

" I think that Iran with a nuclear weapon is extremely destabilizing. I think it could precipitate a nuclear arms race in the region. "

Robert M. Gates

" I had no concerns - I had no reason to have concerns based on what was available to me about North's contacts with the private sector people, but I didn't think a CIA person should do it. "

Robert M. Gates

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Robert M. Gates

" A wild and crazy weekend involves sitting on the front porch, smoking a cigar, reading a book. "

Robert M. Gates

" There's a lot of books out there about how you lead change in business, but I've certainly not seen any... on how you do that in public institutions. "

Robert M. Gates

" I read in the press, and therefore it must be true, that no secretary of defense had ever been quoted as arguing for a bigger budget for State. "

Robert M. Gates

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

Robert M. Gates

" I'm a big advocate of drones. "

Robert M. Gates

" 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

" I wish I could set deadlines for the Congress, but that's just not the way the Constitution is written. "

Robert M. Gates

" 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

" When I was the director of Central Intelligence in the early '90s, I tried to get the Air Force to partner with us in building drones. And they didn't want to, because they had no pilots. "

Robert M. Gates

" Defense is not like other discretionary spending. "

Robert M. Gates

" I had no difficulty as Secretary of Defense moving from the Bush administration to the Obama administration. "

Robert M. Gates

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

Robert M. Gates

" If Poindexter made a comment to me like that, it would have been in the context of once the authorized program is approved there would be no point in having any of these private benefactors any longer. "

Robert M. Gates

" One of my favorite little sayings is, 'To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.' "

Robert M. Gates

" I mean, when you get down to very low numbers of nuclear weapons, and you contemplate going to zero, how do you deal with the reality of that technology being available to almost any country that seeks to pursue it? And what conditions do you put in place? "

Robert M. Gates

" 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

" I have instincts. "

Robert M. Gates

" I have always voted for who I believed was the best person. "

Robert M. Gates

" The United States has been a global power since late in the 19th century. "

Robert M. Gates