Richard Perle's Quotes

Law-abiding citizens value privacy. Terrorists require invisibility. The two are not the same, and they should not be confused.

The jealousy and resentment that animate the terrorists also affect many of our former cold war allies.

To stop terrorists before the strike, we must do three things: deny them entry into the country, curtail their freedom of action inside the country, and deprive them of material and moral support from within the country.

Dictators must have enemies. They must have internal enemies to justify their secret police and external enemies to justify their military forces.

In time, all of Korea will be united in liberty.

Acknowledge that a more closely integrated Europe is no longer an unqualified American interest.

Dictatorships start wars because they need external enemies to exert internal control over their own people.

George Tenet has been the director of central intelligence since 1997, time enough to have changed the Agency's culture. He has failed. He should go.

In any event, the problem in Iran is much bigger than weapons. The problem is the terrorist regime that seeks the weapons. The regime must go.

No operational commander should have to assign a soldier a task that could be done as well by a computer, a remote sensor, or an unmanned airplane.

Right now, American law bars the admission of aliens suspected of terrorist activity - but not of terrorist sympathies.

Sometimes the things we have to do are objectionable in the eyes of others.

The same European governments that hesitated to confront terrorists were more than prepared to oppose us.

We may be so eager to protect the right to dissent that we lose sight of the difference between dissent and subversion.

We must do our utmost to preserve our British ally's strategic independence from Europe.

We should force European governments to choose between Paris and Washington.

But if the UN cannot or will not revise its rules in ways that establish beyond question the legality of the measures the United States must take to protect the American people, then we should unashamedly and explicitly reject the jurisdiction of these rules.

Few governments in the world, for example, praise human rights more ardently than does the government of France, and few have a worse record of supporting tyrants and killers.

If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now.

National sovereignty is an obligation as well as an entitlement. A government that will not perform the role of a government forfeits the rights of a government.

Non-citizen terrorist suspects are not members of the American national community, and they have no proper claim on the rights Americans accord one another.

Nor should we exclude the possibility that Islamic terrorism may begin to make common cause with Western political extremists of the far Left and far Right.

The lax multiculturalism that urges Americans to accept the unacceptable from their fellow citizens is one of this nation's greatest vulnerabilities in the war on terror.