Palestinians caged up like animals.

Foreign policy will require a strategic agility that, whenever possible, gets ahead of problems, strengthens U.S. security and alliances, and promotes American interests and credibility.

Nations, great nations have limitations. All nations have limitations. Even great powers have limitations.

The Bush administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and elsewhere, and should not be demonized or condemned for disagreeing with them. Suggesting that to challenge and criticize policy is undermining and hurting our troops is not democratic, nor what this country has stood for over 200 years.

(The) chain of command has failed over the years, obviously, for a lot of reasons.

I have never believed you go to war in Iraq, you go to war in Afghanistan, and believe that you can deal with those battlefields, those countries, in microcosms, or narrow channels.

I'm the first secretary of defense that's had to deal with sequestration. I've prepared two budgets that deal with sequestration. And you bring the chiefs together, the leadership of this enterprise together, to work through, how do we then take these cuts? Where do we apply those cuts? Readiness is the first thing that suffers.