Colin Powell Quotes

The freedom to do your best means nothing unless you are willing to do your best.

Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.

Saudi Arabia will have to decide its own path, and I don't know if it will decide a path like any other nation in the region or if it will design something that is unique to Saudi Arabia.

One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.

Endeavors succeed or fail because of the people involved.

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.

Don't take counsel of your fears or naysayers.

Only when you have got a clear statement of what you want to achieve, do you ask yourself how you are going to achieve it. In the military we are taught never to go for a single answer, no matter how obvious that might be.

My own experience is that you get as much information as you can and then you pay attention to your intuition, to your informed instinct.

Have a vision. Be demanding.

Let's not forget that Congress bears a lot of responsibility for many of the problems we have now

The United States-Israeli relationship is based on the broadest conception of American national interest in which our two nations are bound forever together by common democratic values and traditions. This will never change.

Ambition and hatred are enough to bring Iraq and al Qaeda together.

Leaders honor their core values, but they are flexible in how they execute them.

Think hard about it: I'm running out of demons. I'm running out of villians. I'm down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.

With respect to our friends in the [Iraq] region, each has its own system, each will have to make its own judgment as to whether it will change, how fast it will change, and we hope that we can help influence them as to how change comes about and what change might be better for them than other forms of change.

I would not presume from this distance, nor would America presume to say who should be the leader of the Iraqi nation.

The essence of leadership is building bonds of trust in your organization.

Some of the generals are saying, 'We're making progress. We are clearing an area.' But you really don't defeat the Taliban by clearing an area. They move.

Let it [racism] be a problem to someone else... Let it drag them down. Don't use it as an excuse for your own shortcomings.

Everybody makes bad decisions. I am sure I have made my share of them over 40 years of service. Or I have made good decisions and have been overruled. The real challenge, when you are overruled, is to remember who the boss is and don't take it personally.

It was the Congress that imposed 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' it was certainly my position, my recommendation to get us out of an even worse outcome that could have occurred.

Being in charge sometimes means making people mad. Some days you have to overrule even the best advice, because you think it is not right.

Trust is the glue that holds an org together & the lubricant that moves it forward.

Finding the Russian scientists may be a problem being that Russia does not have a Social Security System, as here in America, that allows us to monitor, track down and capture an American citizen.

I think that military, corporate, and non-political organizations are pretty much similar.

I have always admired the Linking Pin theory of management specialist Rensis Likert. It says that in every organization there are leaders who link the lower level to the upper level. What makes somebody an effective link as a leader is that he conveys down everything that above wants and he conveys up everything that below needs.

I have found that leadership is leadership is leadership. It applies whether you are in government or in corporate life or in non-profit life.

America has a terrible educational problem in the sense that we have too many youngsters not finishing school. A third of our kids don't finish high school, 50 percent of minorities don't finish high school.

I don't know who all of his advisers are, but I've seen some of the names and some of them are quite far to the right. And sometimes they might be in a position to make judgments or recommendations to the candidate that should get a second thought.

I understand that and I have had very candid discussions with Saudi leaders in the past. I respect their culture and their heritage and their traditions, but I think that they now, as they move forward, will have to start examining these traditions and these practices to see whether or not change is appropriate.

Don't let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision.

So has the strategic decision been made to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction by the leadership in Baghdad? I think our judgment has to be clearly not.

There's no doubt in my mind, though, that the Iraqi people would be better off with a different leader who did not waste their oil on weapons, as opposed to education, as opposed to healthcare, as opposed to food, as opposed to roads, as opposed to clean water. It is really sinful, a crime, what Saddam Hussein has done with the wealth of the Iraqi people over the last 30 years.

I have seen many organizations where there is this sense of purpose in the headquarters but it never gets cascaded down to everybody within the organization.

In the army we are drilled into execution and then supervision, to make sure everything goes the way you planned it. But there is another thing that we do in the military, that I think perhaps isn't done enough in corporate life: As soon as you have made that decision, you start on the contingency planning. Because there is, as we like to say, a thinking, breathing enemy out there, who is not going to let you do just what you want.

Preferring members of any one group for no reason other than race or ethnic origin is discrimination for its own sake. This the Constitution forbids.

It is not our place to decide who should lead the Iraqi people. If Saddam [Hussein] leaves or has to be forced out of power and a new regime brought in, a new leadership brought in, I am confident it will be some combination of people inside the country and outside the country.

Get mad, then get over it.