The Taliban is resilient.

The terrorism from 9/11 has metastasized. It's metastasized in Iraq and Syria, in Nigeria, in Somalia, in Yemen and in other places in North Africa. We need a very comprehensive strategy to deal with that threat.

The president is out there today trying to talk about health care, and the reality is nobody cares about what he's saying on health care because this news is consuming everything. No president could tolerate that or should tolerate it.

If you're a terrorist, you're a terrorist.

One of the principal qualities that you need as national security adviser is trust, the trust of the president. And that depends on truth and it depends on honesty.

These days, it takes only seconds - seconds - for a picture, a photo, to suddenly become an international headline.

After every major conflict - World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union - what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep across-the-board cuts.