You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.
What I know concerns me. What I don't know concerns me even more. What people aren't telling me worries me the most.
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 think in the context of senior government positions, I think an anecdote of what I told President-Elect Barack Obama when we had our first meeting. And I said, "You don't know me. Can you trust me? Why do you think you can trust me?" and so on. But at the end, I said, "You can count on me to be loyal to you. I will not leak. I will keep my disagreements with you private. And if I cannot be loyal, I'll leave. " Loyalty means doing what you think is in the best interest of that person as well as the country.
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.
I fired a lot of senior people myself and I think the key, when you feel compelled to remove a senior official, is essentially to have all your ducks in a row at the beginning. Have everybody understand what the rationale was.
No policy has proved more successful in making friends for the United States, during the cold war and since, than educating students from abroad at our colleges and universities.
I try to be true to myself yet still at the same time look at comments and look at what the fans have to say and kind of put it in perspective. I'm never someone whose not open for opinion, I'm always just down to make it work and see how we can do things but at the end of the day I always want to make sure it represents me. It's really about just being humble and not selling yourself on being there already.
Saturday comes again, welcome or not, it comes again like it always does, welcome or not, wanted or not, another judgment day - The chance to be saved, the chance to be damned.
There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users'.
Time is the only critic.