Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

Our failure was that our intelligence community thought [Saddam Hussein ] had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. That was a mistake. There is fallibility in human intelligence and in human decisions.

I think you can improve on that natural ability with training and exposure to great leaders of the past and to management theories.

The best method of overcoming obstacles is the team method

Be careful what you choose: You may get it.

If everybody trusts one another, then the person who didn't prevail will faithfully execute the decision as if it was their idea.

We need stable regimes in this part of the world [the Mideast] who will be partners and friends of ours, because the fact of the matter is we do rely on imported oil to fuel our economy and to fuel our nation.