Perle Quotes & Sayings

Acknowledge that a more closely integrated Europe is no longer an unqualified American interest. — Richard Perle

I think there's no question that, even though we may not have the evidence as Richard (Perle) says, that there have been such contacts (between Iraq and al Qaeda). It' s normal. It's natural. These are a lot of bad actors in the same region together. They are going to bump into each other. They are going to exchange information. They're going to feel each other out and see whether there are opportunities to cooperate. That's inevitable in this region, and I think it's clear that regardless of whether or not such evidence is produced of these connections that Saddam Hussein is a threat. — Wesley Clark

We may be so eager to protect the right to dissent that we lose sight of the difference between dissent and subversion. — Richard Perle

Non-citizen terrorist suspects are not members of the American national community, and they have no proper claim on the rights Americans accord one another. — Richard Perle

But even a nation of laws must understand the limits of legalism. — Richard Perle

The lax multiculturalism that urges Americans to accept the unacceptable from their fellow citizens is one of this nation's greatest vulnerabilities in the war on terror. — Richard Perle

There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they've been liberated. — Richard Perle

Law-abiding citizens value privacy. Terrorists require invisibility. The two are not the same, and they should not be confused. — Richard Perle

As soon as I had believed that financial security purchased emotional security, I'd lived a dependent, conditional life. Now I realize that rather than mortgage myself for a dream life on a layaway plan, I prefer the rather nice kind of life I've stumbled into. My desire for a double oven has less to do with signaling that I belong to a certain class or have reached a type of perfection and more to do with the fact that I haven't figured out how to make a pot roast and an apple pie at the same time. So I make the pie ahead of time and reheat it. I think it was Mark Twain who said, 'Happiness is wanting what you have, not having what you want.' I tell my kids this, hoping they will learn to balance the act of pursuing with the act of savoring. — Liz Perle

When you gaze into souls, it's something you should update periodically, because souls can change. — Richard Perle

I think there is a potential civic culture in Arab countries that can lead to democratic institutions and I think Iraq is probably the best place to put that proposition to the test Well, you're going to find a disproportionate number of Jews in any sort of intellectual undertaking. — Richard Perle

The programme of the British Labour Party under Neil Kinnock is so wildly irresponsible, so separate and apart from the historic NATO strategy, that I think a Labour government that stood by its present policies and I rather doubt that they would would, if it didn't destroy the Alliance, at least diminish its effective ability to do the task for which it was created. — Richard Perle

We should force European governments to choose between Paris and Washington. — Richard Perle

These are lies, there is not a word of truth in them. — Richard Perle

National sovereignty is an obligation as well as an entitlement. A government that will not perform the role of a government forfeits the rights of a government. — Richard Perle

Iraq is a very wealthy country. Enormous oil reserves. They can finance, largely finance, the reconstruction of their own country. And I have no doubt that they will. — Richard Perle

Even now, the irony that so non-intellectual a man should choose to engage the Soviet Union on the battlefield of ideas has eluded most commentators and historians. — Richard Perle

Support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse after the first whiff of gunpowder. — Richard Perle

The same European governments that hesitated to confront terrorists were more than prepared to oppose us. — Richard Perle

Few governments in the world, for example, praise human rights more ardently than does the government of France, and few have a worse record of supporting tyrants and killers. — Richard Perle

For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation's great cause ... There is no middle way for Americans: it is victory or holocaust. — Richard Perle

Right now, American law bars the admission of aliens suspected of terrorist activity - but not of terrorist sympathies. — Richard Perle

Dictatorships start wars because they need external enemies to exert internal control over their own people. — Richard Perle

No operational commander should have to assign a soldier a task that could be done as well by a computer, a remote sensor, or an unmanned airplane. — Richard Perle

But if the UN cannot or will not revise its rules in ways that establish beyond question the legality of the measures the United States must take to protect the American people, then we should unashamedly and explicitly reject the jurisdiction of these rules. — Richard Perle

Dictators must have enemies. They must have internal enemies to justify their secret police and external enemies to justify their military forces. — Richard Perle

In time, all of Korea will be united in liberty. — Richard Perle

If ... [Alban] Berg departs so radically from tradition, through his substitution of a symmetrical partitioning of the octave for the asymmetrical partionings of the major/minor system, he departs just as radically from the twelve-tone tradition that is represented in the music of Schoenberg and Webern, for whom the twelve-tone series was always an integral structure that could be transposed only as a unit, and for whom twelve-tone music always implied a constant and equivalent circulation of the totality of pitch classes. — George Perle

In any event, the problem in Iran is much bigger than weapons. The problem is the terrorist regime that seeks the weapons. The regime must go. — Richard Perle

No one is talking about occupying Iraq for five to ten years. — Richard Perle

The jealousy and resentment that animate the terrorists also affect many of our former cold war allies. — Richard Perle

I would not want you to suppose that my rejection of Allen Forte's theory of pitch-class sets implies a rejection of the notion that there can be such a thing as a pitch-class set. It is only when one defines everything in terms of pitch-class sets that the concept becomes meaningless. — George Perle

The people who got everything wrong are back on TV talking about the place they got all wrong? Cheney, Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle. It's like Satan's VIP list for Hell. — Bill Maher

There are, however, composers whose music can only be heard in a chromatic sense. George Perle, for example, wrote pieces that you might think of as leaning in a tonal direction but it's very hard to register a pitch as, say, the sixth degree of a scale, whereas in much of my music I think that's often relatively easy to do. — Paul Lansky

If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now. — Richard Perle

Now, from the crown of my head to the curve of my toe-nails, there was an unguent for every part of me - oil for my eyebrows and cream for my lashes; a jar of tooth-powder, a box of blanc-de-perle; polish for my fingernails and a scarlet stick to redden my mouth; tweezers for drawing the hairs from my nipples, and a stone to take the hard flesh from my heels. — Sarah Waters

To stop terrorists before the strike, we must do three things: deny them entry into the country, curtail their freedom of action inside the country, and deprive them of material and moral support from within the country. — Richard Perle

Nor should we exclude the possibility that Islamic terrorism may begin to make common cause with Western political extremists of the far Left and far Right. — Richard Perle

Sometimes the things we have to do are objectionable in the eyes of others. — Richard Perle

The leaders of the empire, the imperial mafia-George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, et al ... are as fanatic and as fundamentalist as Osama bin Laden. — William Blum

George Tenet has been the director of central intelligence since 1997, time enough to have changed the Agency's culture. He has failed. He should go. — Richard Perle

Every bit of theorizing I've ever done, including my interest in Berg, has come as a consequence of discoveries I made as a composer and interests that I developed as a composer. I never thought of my theory as being a kind of irrelevant activity to my composing. — George Perle

We must do our utmost to preserve our British ally's strategic independence from Europe. — Richard Perle

I think we have an administration today that is dysfunctional. And if it can't get itself together to organize a serious program for finding nuclear material on its way to the United States, then it ought to be replaced by an administration that can. — Richard Perle