Explore Quotes by Robert M. Gates

I'm a big advocate of drones.

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

I have instincts.

Health care costs are eating the Defense Department alive.

Things have gotten so nasty in Washington.

Well, I've ruffled a few feathers at all the institutions I've led. But I think that's part of leadership.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.'

I have always that there ought to be some kind of mandatory national service, not necessarily in the military but to show everybody that freedom isn't free, that everybody has an obligation to the nation as a community.

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

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.

Congress is best viewed from a distance—the farther the better—because up close, it is truly ugly. I saw most of Congress as uncivil, incompetent at fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned and prone to put self (and re-election) before country.

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

Future U.S. political leaders – those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me – may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.

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

There will be boots on the ground if there's to be any hope of success in the strategy.

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

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?'