Quotes By Dick Cheney

A little tough talk in the midst of a campaign or as part of a presidential debate cannot obscure a record of 30 years of being on the wrong side of defense issues.

I am a deficit hawk.

In his years in Washington, Senator Kerry has been one vote of a hundred in the United States Senate - and fortunately on matters of national security he was very often in the minority.

I think there's no question but what the tail end of the Bush administration, Bush-Cheney administration, that we took steps specifically geared to try and free up the financial sector.

From our perspective, trying to deal with this continuing campaign of terror, if you will, the war on terror that we're engaged in, this is a continuing enterprise. The people that were involved in some of those activities before 9/11 are still out there.

In terms of asking questions, I plead guilty. I ask a hell of a lot of questions. That's my job.

You can't fall back on the private sector and say, 'You take care of the nation's banking system.' That's a fundamental function of the government, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and the FDIC, etc. All of those agencies have a major role to play there.

The Iraqi forces are conducting the Mother of all Retreats.

I've worked for four presidents and watched two others up close, and I know that there's no such thing as a routine day in the Oval Office.

Westerners know the difference between a talker and the real deal. If Rick Perry wasn't right to be governor of Texas, why should he be president?

The Senator from Massachusetts has given us ample grounds to doubt the judgment and the attitude he brings to bear on vital issues of national security.

I believe very deeply in the proposition that what we did in Iraq was the right thing to do. It was hard to do. It took a long time. There were significant costs involved.

Had the decision belonged to Senator Kerry, Saddam hussein would still be in power today in Iraq. In fact, Saddam Hussein would almost certainly still be in control of Kuwait.

If you're going to go increase taxes on small businesses, you're going to slow down the extent to which we're able to reduce unemployment. So I think it's a serious mistake; the wrong time to raise taxes.

We must be prepared to face our responsibilities and be willing to use force if necessary.

We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.

I'm absolutely convinced that the threat we face now, the idea of a terrorist in the middle of one of our cities with a nuclear weapon, is very real and that we have to use extraordinary measures to deal with it.

We need to have a pro-growth policy put in place that offers people hope and offers the opportunity for businesses to expand and for them to have confidence in what the world is going to look like for the next two or three or four years with respect to economic policy.

It's very important to go back and keep in mind the distinction between handling these events as criminal acts, which was the way we did before 9/11, and then looking at 9/11 and saying, "This is not a criminal act," not when you destroy 16 acres of Manhattan, kill 3,000 Americans, blow a big hole in the Pentagon. That's an act of war.

One of the reasons the deficit got as big as it did, frankly, was because of the economic slowdown, the fall-off in deficits, the terrorist attacks. A significant chunk was taken out of the economy by what happened after the attacks of 9/11.

From kindergarten to graduation, I went to public schools, and I know that they are a key to being sure that every child has a chance to succeed and to rise in the world.

I think we need to significantly reduce the regulatory burden on the private sector. The Obama administration is doing the opposite. They're loading on more and more regulation on the private respect to how the economy functions.

We were trying to get all of the planes down out of the sky. And we watched as the towers of the World Trade Center collapsed - something no one expected and anticipated. And you could sit there and see and be aware that thousands of people were at that moment being killed as a result of the terrorist attacks that struck the United States.

You know, I've got experiences going back to the wage price controls in the Nixon administration where, in effect, we had what I think was a terrible mistake, in that case a Republican administration, where moved in and tried to control the wages, prices and profits of every enterprise in America. It was a huge mistake.

You got to have people at the top who respond to and are selected by presidents.

I believe that we were not as effective in the second term dealing with this issue of nuclear none proliferation as we had been during the first term when we stripped Libya and Iraq and A.Q. Khan and their capacity to proliferate nuclear technology.

If we have reason to believe someone is preparing an attack against the U.S., has developed that capability, harbours those aspirations, then I think the U.S. is justified in dealing with that, if necessary, by military force.

We have to make America the best place in the world to do business.

I can think of a lot of words to describe Senator Kerry's position on Iraq; "consistent" is not one of them.

Except for the occasional heart attack, I never felt better.