Wolfowitz Quotes & Sayings

There is a division within the neo-conservative movement, which is, by the way, one of the tests of its authenticity as a tendency. I would say I was a supporter of Paul Wolfowitz. — Christopher Hitchens

I think, in the longer view of things, there is a very powerful pull in the direction of participatory government. — Paul Wolfowitz

I like globalization; I want to say it works, but it is hard to say that when six hundred million people are slipping backwards. — Paul Wolfowitz

Being on a book tour is like being on the seesaw when you're a little kid. The excitement is in having someone to play with, and in rising up in the air, but then you're at the mercy of those holding you down, and if it's your older brother, or Paul Wolfowitz, they leap up, so that you crash down and get hurt. — Anne Lamott

When I went back to Iraq again, after the liberation was complete, I was myself engaged on a sort of "dig", and I decided to travel with Paul Wolfowitz. It was in its own way an archaeological and anthropological expedition. Here are some of the things we unearthed or observed. Unnoticed by almost everybody, and unreported by most newspapers, Saddam Hussein's former chief physicist Dr. Mahdi Obeidi had waited until a few weeks after the fall of Baghdad to accost some American soldiers and invite them to excavate his back garden. There he showed them the components of a gas centrifuge
the crown jewels of uranium enrichment
along with a two-foot stack of blueprints. This burial had originally been ordered by Saddam's younger son Qusay, who had himself been in charge of the Ministry of Concealment, and had outlasted many visits by "inspectors". I myself rather doubt that Hans Blix would ever have found the trove on his own. — Christopher Hitchens

I certainly don't like a label that suggests I believe that the military is the solution to most of the world's problems. — Paul Wolfowitz

That sense of what happened in Europe in World War II has shaped a lot of my views. — Paul Wolfowitz

And then, of course, Bush won reelection, with everything out there, all of our complaints, all of the issues, all of the troubles with Iraq. So where are we? Bush certainly sees himself as having been given an endorsement. He was asked about accountability in an interview, about why Rumsfeld, Rice, and Wolfowitz have been promoted, these people who led us into the debacle in Iraq. Bush said there was accountability - it was the election. So there we are. — Seymour Hersh

Iraq has no history of ethnic conflict. — Paul Wolfowitz

No one argues that we should have imposed a dictatorship in Afghanistan having liberated the country. Similarly, we weren't about to impose a dictatorship in Iraq having liberated the country. — Paul Wolfowitz

Jobs are a priority for every country. Doing more to improve regulation and help entrepreneurs is the key to creating jobs - and more growth. — Paul Wolfowitz

Then all at once our personal and political quarrels were made very abruptly to converge. In the special edition of the London Review of Books published to mark the events of September 11, 2001, Edward painted a picture of an almost fascist America where Arab and Muslim citizens were being daily terrorized by pogroms, these being instigated by men like Paul Wolfowitz who had talked of 'ending' the regimes that sheltered Al Quaeda. Again, I could hardly credit that these sentences were being produced by a cultured person, let alone printed by a civilized publication. — Christopher Hitchens

We don't start a job that we can't finish ... that's the American way. — Paul Wolfowitz

For no good reason, George W. Bush and the best and brightest he could muster, including the likes of Paul Bremer and Paul Wolfowitz, decided it made sense to attack Iraq. — Jay Parini

I mean, we're going to probably debate the Iraq war for at least as long as I'm alive. — Paul Wolfowitz

Poles understand perhaps better than anyone the consequences of making toothless warnings to brutal tyrants and terrorist regimes. — Paul Wolfowitz

I told my father I had to try political science for a year. He thought I was throwing my life away. — Paul Wolfowitz

It's wonderful that so many people want to contribute to fighting aids or malaria. But, if somebody isn't paying attention to the overall health system in the country, a whole lot of money can be wasted. — Paul Wolfowitz

It is kind of nice to have a common purpose. — Paul Wolfowitz

Someone once said that history has more imagination than all the scenario writers in the Pentagon, and we have a lot of scenario writers here. No one ever wrote a scenario for commercial airliners crashing into the World Trade Center. — Paul Wolfowitz

History is just littered with problems that were solved that were supposed to be impossible. — Paul Wolfowitz

We did not go to war in Afghanistan or in Iraq to, quote, 'impose democracy.' We went to war in both places because we saw those regimes as a threat to the United States. — Paul Wolfowitz

Part of what is wrong with the view of American imperialism is that it is antithetical to our interests. We are better off when people are governing themselves. I'm sure there is some guy that will tell you that philosophy is no different from the Roman Empire's. Well, it is fundamentally different. — Paul Wolfowitz

For one thing I tend not to see myself in various moulds that people fit me into. — Paul Wolfowitz

I think one has to say it's not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism. And that's why it has to be a broad and sustained campaign. — Paul Wolfowitz

Generally speaking, the stronger the connection between the financing and the ultimate beneficiary, the better the result. — Paul Wolfowitz

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

The absence of Saddam is a huge weight off the Arab world. — Paul Wolfowitz

Look, I think the notion that there's a dogma or doctrine of foreign policy that gives you a textbook recipe for how to react to all situations is really nonsense. — Paul Wolfowitz

Washington's all abstraction. It's about access to power and nothing else. I mean, I'm sure it's fun if you're living next door to Seinfeld, or To Wolfe, or Mike Bloomberg, but living next door to them isn't what New York is about, In Washington people literally talk about how many feet away from John Kerry's house their own house is. The neighborhoods are all so blah, the only thing that turns people on is proximity to power. It's a total fetish culture. People get this kind of orgasmic shiver when they tell you they sat next to Paul Wolfowitz at a conference or got invited to Grover Norquist's breakfast. — Jonathan Franzen

The American people are pretty impressive in their ability to keep after something if they think it is doable. — Paul Wolfowitz

One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war. — Paul Wolfowitz

I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq. Those who want to come and help are welcome. Those who come to interfere and destroy are not. — Paul Wolfowitz

Before September 11, terrorism was viewed as something ugly but you lived with it. — Paul Wolfowitz

Unlike old-fashioned Britain, where Tony Blair recruited Lord Levy to encourage his 'Friends of Israel' to donate their money to a party that was just about to launch a criminal war, in America Alan Greenspan provided his president with an astonishing economic boom. It seems that the prosperous conditions at home divert the attention from the disastrous war in Iraq.
Greenspan is not an amateur economist, he knew what he was doing. He knew very well that as long as Americans were doing well, buying and selling homes, his President would be able to continue implementing the 'Wolfowitz doctrine' and PNAC philosophy, destroying the 'bad Arabs' in the name of 'democracy', 'liberalism', 'ethics', and even 'women's rights'. — Gilad Atzmon

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

China, in the future, is going to have even more nuclear capability than it has had in the past. I don't believe that they have anything to fear from the United States, and I frankly don't believe they do fear the United States. — Paul Wolfowitz

I think it's a mistake to rely too much on any one economic factor. It's why investors try to spread their portfolio round. — Paul Wolfowitz

You can't be involved in healthcare without being involved in the battle against AIDS. — Paul Wolfowitz

The cost of the high-cost economy remains too high. — Paul Wolfowitz

Support for peaceful reform by the people themselves is the right way to promote democracy, not the use of force. — Paul Wolfowitz

I have always had a tendency to keep enlarging problems which I personally think is the way the world works ... that seeing anything one dimensionally on the kinds of political, sort of big issues of human progress is going to be a distorted view of things, which is why over my career I have gone seemingly from subject to subject to subject. — Paul Wolfowitz

Sometimes corruption is slowed by shedding light into what was previously shadowed. — Paul Wolfowitz

It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine. — Paul Wolfowitz

I've met quite a few dictators up close and personal in my life. — Paul Wolfowitz

I'm constantly asking for alternative views on most things that come to me. — Paul Wolfowitz

If greater openness is a key to economic success, I believe there is increasingly a need for openness in the political sphere as well. — Paul Wolfowitz

The internal affairs of other countries has a big impact on American interests. — Paul Wolfowitz

The most striking thing is that even before Osama bin Laden was killed, he seemed largely irrelevant to the Arab Spring. — Paul Wolfowitz

I'm not sure the oil producers are enjoying real growth. That troubles me. For experience has shown that oil can be more of a curse than a blessing. And not only in Africa. — Paul Wolfowitz

There's a lot of money to pay for this ... the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years ... We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon. — Paul Wolfowitz

Public action should seek to expand the set of opportunities of those who have the least voice and fewest resources and capabilities. — Paul Wolfowitz

Bush himself came into office with no curiosity about the world, only a suspicion that his predecessor had entangled America in far too many obscure places of no importance to national interests. Wolfowitz — George Packer

For the private sector to flourish, special privilege must give way to equal opportunity and equal risk for all. — Paul Wolfowitz

Look, I think the public generally understands that what's at stake in Afghanistan is American security, number one. — Paul Wolfowitz

You can't win if you're chasing the wrong problem. — Paul Wolfowitz

It's a very bad thing when people exterminate other people, and people persecute minorities. — Paul Wolfowitz

The use of force to liberate people is very different from the use of force to suppress or control them, or even to defeat them. — Paul Wolfowitz

Democracy is a process. — Paul Wolfowitz

I think that all countries that participate in multilateral institutions see the institutions as a way of advancing what they view as their national interests and they see in many cases multi-lateral institution as the best way to do that. — Paul Wolfowitz