Explore Quotes by Robert M. Gates

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

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

I have tried to maintain civil relationships with everyone I meet - and, even if I violently disagree with them, try to be respectful.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Defense is not like other discretionary spending.

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.

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

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.

No president is well-served by groupthink or by everybody singing from the same sheet of music they think he's on.

There is no international problem that can be addressed or solved without the engagement and leadership of the United States and everybody in the world knows that, its just fact of life. So sometimes I think we could conduct ourselves with a little more humility.

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.

Most governments lie to each other. That's the way business gets done.

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.

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.