I fired a lot of senior people myself and I think the key, when you feel compelled to remove a senior official, is essentially to have all your ducks in a row at the beginning. Have everybody understand what the rationale was.

We should never lose sight of the ethos that has made the Marine Corps - where 'every Marine is a rifleman' - one of America's cherished institutions and one of the world's most feared and respected fighting forces

The United States has been a global power since late in the 19th century.

A wild and crazy weekend involves sitting on the front porch, smoking a cigar, reading a book.

I think that Vladimir Putin is certainly getting a lot of publicity for what the Russians are doing. And I'm not sure that's unwelcome to him. I think this is a guy who saw the U.S. basically come out against him in his reelection campaign in 2012. He saw the U.S. being behind all of the color revolutions in Eastern Europe and in Georgia and Ukraine and so on. So his view is the West has been interfering in his politics for years.

One of my favorite little sayings is, 'To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.

Congress is best viewed from a distance—the farther the better—because up close, it is truly ugly. I saw most of Congress as uncivil, incompetent at fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned and prone to put self (and re-election) before country.