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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

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Source: An End To Evil: How To Win the War on Terror, David Frum, Richard N. Perle, Ballantine (reprint,2004), Chapter 5 'The War Abroad,' p. 102 : ISBN 0345477170
Source quality: Precise citation Points to a specific work with a page, chapter, date or similar locator, so you can look it up.

More by Richard Perle

"I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing." (2003)

I really don't have a solution. Except to say that a precondition for any solution must be a recognition on the part of all parties on the legitimacy of all parties. That is you cannot build a political agreement on the premise that a Jewish state in Palestine is illegitimate.

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Topics

Government

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

About George W. Bush: "He came ill-equipped for the job and has failed to master it."

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

I’ve never thought much of Joe Nye’s writings on soft power.

Well, you’re going to find a disproportionate number of Jews in any sort of intellectual undertaking.

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Ill can he rule the great, that cannot reach the small.

Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene (1589)

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.

James Madison

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

Leon Trotsky The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

John Adams

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Richard Perle (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.