“I’m a professor of national security studies, and I know a lot more about fighting than Rumsfeld does.”

So I don’t think we’ve got any options and we’d be ill-advised to start bombing where we really can’t sort out the combatants or understand where the civilian population is.

Experience is valuable only if it’s imbued with meaning from which one can draw salient conclusions. Otherwise, experience becomes imprisoning.

We’ve got a national campaign by drug legalizers, in my view, to try and use medicinal uses of drugs and legalization of hemp as a stalking horse to get in under the radar screen.

The United States and Mexico are trapped – economically, culturally, politically and because of drug crime – in the same continent.

So at the end of the day, our number 1 goal, our top priority, is to motivate American youngsters to reject the abuse of illegal drugs, tobacco and alcohol. All three of them are illegal behaviors.

We say in a democracy that good ideas will drive out bad ones, so if the good ones aren’t there, we’re left with the bad ones

If you want to fight a war on drugs, sit down at your own kitchen table and talk to your own children.

At the end of the day…if your army won’t fight, it’s because they don’t trust their incompetent, corrupt generals, they don’t trust each other. This is an enduring civil war between the Shia, the Sunni, and the Kurds.

Colombia is in a risky position. They’ve got a peace process that’s going nowhere, and a drug production problem that’s skyrocketing.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

Extremely disappointed that corruption may have reached such a level in Mexico.

Thank God we’re going to try to continue and effectively defend our frontiers with the Border Patrol, with the Customs Department, with the Coast Guard, with the Armed Forces.

When I get a very generous introduction like that I explain that I’m emotionally moved, but on the other hand I’m Irish and the Irish are very emotionally moved. My mother is Irish and she cries during beer commercials.

Drugs are the enemies of ambition and hope – and when we fight against drugs we are fighting for the future.

For a player to be good enough to play for Liverpool, he must be prepared to run through a brick wall for me then come out fighting on the other side.

Barack Obama can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word “victory” except when he’s talking about his own campaign.

At times you have to fight. No way around it. At some point, every one of us is confronted with danger or injustice.

Seeking them out and holding on to them. And don’t ever cease standing up for what you believe in, and fighting for those things that you want.

There is no force more liberating than the knowledge that you are fighting for others.

As I now often tell my daughter Lila, no matter what stage of life you’re in, when you want something – no matter how impossible it seems – you need to fight for it. When you believe in something, fight for it. And when you see injustice, fight harder than you’ve ever fought before.

If something’s working, you lean into it. You don’t fight it.