Richard Perle Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation’s great cause … There is no middle way for Americans: it is victory or holocaust.

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.

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

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.

There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they've been liberated.

When you gaze into souls, it's something you should update periodically, because souls can change.

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

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

Even now, the irony that so non-intellectual a man should choose to engage the Soviet Union on the battlefield of ideas has eluded most commentators and historians.

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.

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

I think there is a potential civic culture in Arab countries that can lead to democratic institutions and I think Iraq is probably the best place to put that proposition to the test Well, you're going to find a disproportionate number of Jews in any sort of intellectual undertaking.

Support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse after the first whiff of gunpowder.

Iraq is a very wealthy country. Enormous oil reserves. They can finance, largely finance the reconstruction of their own country. And I have no doubt that they will.

No one is talking about occupying Iraq for five to ten years.

The programme of the British Labour Party under Neil Kinnock is so wildly irresponsible, so separate and apart from the historic NATO strategy, that I think a Labour government that stood by its present policies - and I rather doubt that they would - would, if it didn't destroy the Alliance, at least diminish its effective ability to do the task for which it was created.