A free society is not an unpoliced society. A free society is a self-policed society.
– Richard Perle
A year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush.
– Richard Perle
Acknowledge that a more closely integrated Europe is no longer an unqualified American interest.
– Richard Perle
But even a nation of laws must understand the limits of legalism. Between 1861 and 1865, the government of the United States took tens of thousands of American citizens prisoner and detained them for years without letting any one of them see a lawyer.
– 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
Dictatorships start wars because they need external enemies to exert internal control over their own people.
– 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
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
I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing.
– Richard Perle
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
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
In the Middle East, democratization does not mean calling immediate elections and then living with whatever happens next.
– Richard Perle
In time, all of Korea will be united in liberty.
– Richard Perle
Law-abiding citizens value privacy. Terrorists require invisibility. The two are not the same, and they should not be confused.
– 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
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
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
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
Right now, American law bars the admission of aliens suspected of terrorist activity - but not of terrorist sympathies.
– Richard Perle
Sometimes the things we have to do are objectionable in the eyes of others.
– Richard Perle
The administration's solicitude for Muslim sensitivities might well have been interpreted by many Muslims as a vindication of bin Laden's methods.
– Richard Perle
The CIA is blinded, too, by the squeamishness that many liberal-minded people feel about noticing the dark side of third world cultures.
– Richard Perle
The determination of the State Department to reconcile the irreconcilable, to negotiate the unnegotiable, and to appease the unappeasable is an obstacle to victory.
– Richard Perle
The FBI must return to the job it does best: catching criminals. It should be fired from the counterterrorism job it has bungled, and its counterterrorism units and employees should be reassigned to a new domestic intelligence agency.
– Richard Perle
The jealousy and resentment that animate the terrorists also affect many of our former cold war allies.
– 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
The same European governments that hesitated to confront terrorists were more than prepared to oppose us.
– 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
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
We can train Iraqi soldiers to combat insurgencies while respecting human rights, as we have trained armies in the Philippines and Latin America.
– Richard Perle
We may be so eager to protect the right to dissent that we lose sight of the difference between dissent and subversion.
– Richard Perle
We must do our utmost to preserve our British ally's strategic independence from Europe.
– Richard Perle
We should force European governments to choose between Paris and Washington.