Paul Wolfowitz quotes:

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Iraq has no history of ethnic conflict.

The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction, as the core reason.

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

I can't predict the future.

Democracy is a process.

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

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

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.

It is kind of nice to have a common purpose.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

After a regime is removed, however, it is dangerous to leave a security vacuum.

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.

Donald Trump seems to be unconcerned about the Russian aggression in Ukraine. By doing this he tells them that they can go ahead and do what they are doing. That is dangerous.

Every math curriculum in the world is based on the idea of hand-calculating, and most of what you're teaching is how to calculate. And I think the resistance to this is very variable.

Firing employees, that's unfortunately a part of doing business.

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

I certainly think it's important to speak up and say how unacceptable Donald Trump is. I'm always more than willing to do that.

I don't know of a single instance of these Arab freedom fighters holding up pictures of bin Laden. I know many instances of them displaying American flags in Benghazi or painting 'Facebook' on their foreheads in Cairo. The idea of freedom . . . is absolutely contradictory to what bin Laden stood for, which was . . . taking Muslims back to some medieval theocracy and encouraging people to die not for freedom but to go to paradise and to kill innocent people along the way. The contrast is really striking.

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.

I think Obama sees everything through one lens. Doing nothing in the face of the slaughter in Syria is not only shameful, it is unrealistic. This approach leaves Syria as a broken country and a breeding ground for extremists for decades.

I wish there were somebody I could be comfortable voting for. I might have to vote for Hillary Clinton, even though I have big reservations about her.

If a cat sits on a hot stove once, it will never sit on a cold one either.

If the Arab world today looked like Tunisia, it would be a huge blow for the extreme ideologies. But Tunisia needs more support than it is getting, particularly from their close neighbors in Europe who have a great stake in North Africa.

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

Islamic State is mainly a direct result of the failure in Syria. That's where IS has grown. That's where IS spread from.

It would be a huge mistake to abandon democracy promotion. Peaceful political change has been enormously successful in the past years in Eastern European countries as well as in countries like South Korea, South Africa, Chile and Indonesia. However, if possible, the use of force is something to avoid except in cases where genocide is threatened, like Bosnia or Libya or with regimes that threaten our security, like the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.

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.

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

NATO is still the most remarkable alliance in history. It stuck together through 40 years of Cold War, and it then joined together to fight in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, I would not have thought this was going to be possible.

Our security depends on having good relationships with our allies. Donald Trump mainly shows contempt for them.

People change their habits. I know Americans who don't go to Paris because they think it is too dangerous.

People seem to forget that Saddam was the only leader in the world who praised the attacks of 9/11 as a good thing.

Putin is behaving in a very dangerous way. And Donald Trump sounds as though he would simply sit back and allow that to go on. I worry about where that would end up.

Saddam Hussein had nerve gas and used it against his own people, he had used chemical weapons against the Iranians and he almost had a nuclear bomb in 1981 and in 1991. And he had been caught with anthrax in 1995 by the UN inspections after denying that he had it.

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

The American people are pretty impressive in their ability to keep after something if they think it is doable,

The Bernie Sanders phenomenon shows that it's not confined to Republicans. There is a general sentiment that America is on the wrong track.

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

The Western alliance should have supported the Sunni opposition against the Assad regime from the beginning. As far as Iraq is concerned, if it had stayed stable the way it was in 2008, IS would not have been able to expand in Iraq the way they did. The mistake was that Barack Obama withdrew the armed forces from Iraq too fast.

To stay back from an intervention is not always a good solution.

We are already seeing a degree of instability in the world because Obama seems to have consciously wanted to step back. Donald Trump is going to be "Obama squared," a more extreme version of the same thing.

You cant win if youre chasing the wrong problem.

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.

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.

The only way you can be comfortable about Donald Trump's foreign policy, is to think he doesn't really mean anything he says.