All Quotes

"Annette Bening - Carolyn Burnham"

"Thora Birch - Jane Burnham"

"Wes Bentley - Ricky Fitts"

"Mena Suvari - Angela Hayes"

"Peter Gallagher - Buddy Kane"

"Allison Janney - Barbara Fitts"

"Chris Cooper - Col. Frank Fitts, USMC"

"Scott Bakula - Jim Olmeyer"

"Sam Robards - Jim Berkley"

"Barry Del Sherman - Brad Dupree"

"Poker is a microcosm of all we admire and disdain about capitalism and democracy. It can be rough-hewn or polished, warm or cold, charitable and caring or hard and impersonal. It is fickle and elusive, but ultimately it is fair, and right, and just."

"Human rights is a universal standard. It is a component of every religion and every civilization."

"When a person is humiliated, when his rights are being violated, and he does not have the proper education, naturally he gravitates toward terrorism."

"It's a difficult thing today to be informed about our government even without all the secrecy."

"Any person who pursues human rights in Iran must live with fear from birth to death, but I have learned to overcome my fear."

"In the last 23 years, from the day I was stripped of my judgeship to the years of doing battle in the revolutionary courts of Tehran, I had repeated one refrain: an interpretation of Islam that is in harmony with equality and democracy is an authentic expression of faith. It is not religion that binds women, but the selective dictates of those who wish them cloistered. That belief, along with the conviction that change in Iran must come peacefully and from within, has underpinned my work."

"In my memoir, I wanted to introduce American women to Iranian women and our lives. I'm not from the highest echelons of society, nor the lowest. I'm a women who is a lawyer, who is a professor at a university, who won the Nobel Peace Prize. At the same time, I cook. And even when I'm about to go to prison, one of the first things I do is to make enough food and put it in the fridge for my family."

"I compare my situation to a person on board a ship. When there is a shipwreck the passenger then falls in the ocean and has no choice but to keep swimming. What happened in our society was that the laws overturned every right that women had. I had no choice. I could not get tired, I could not lose hope. I cannot afford to do that."

"I, who have defended many prisoners of conscience such as the seven imprisoned Baha'i leaders and others, would face unacceptable restrictions on my human rights work if I returned to Iran, if I were not arrested, now my own lawyer - who also represents many other activists - is detained, and her lawyer has been threatened with arrest for defending her. Where is the justice if your lawyer is arrested for defending you?"

"Congress, the press, and the bureaucracy too often focus on how much money or effort is spent, rather than whether the money or effort actually achieves the announced goal."

"It is easier to get into something than to get out of it."

"Be able to resign. It will improve your value to the President and do wonders for your performance."

"This war [in Vietnam] has been marked by so many lies and evasions... that it is not right to have the war end with one last lie."

"Pearl Harbor Post-Mortem: In some future hearing, I am going to say that I do not want to be sitting before this panel in a modern day version of a Pearl Harbor post-mortem as to who didn't do what, when, where and why. None of us would want to have to be back here going through that agony."

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones."

"I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that."

"And it is not knowable if force will be used, but if it is to be used, it is not knowable how long that conflict would last. It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."

"Then there are three or four countries that have said they won't do anything. I believe Libya, Cuba and Germany are ones that have indicated they won't help in any respect."

"Now, you're thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don't. I think that's old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east. And there are a lot of new members. And if you just take the list of all the members of NATO and all of those who have been invited in recently -- what is it? Twenty-six, something like that? -- you're right. Germany has been a problem, and France has been a problem. But you look at vast numbers of other countries in Europe. They're not with France and Germany on this, they're with the United States."

"I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was Henny Penny -- "The sky is falling." I've never seen anything like it! And here is a country that's being liberated, here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free. And all this newspaper could do, with eight or 10 headlines, they showed a man bleeding, a civilian, who they claimed we had shot —one thing after another. From the very beginning, we were convinced that we would succeed, and that means that that regime would end. And we were convinced that as we went from the end of that regime to something other than that regime, there would be a period of transition. And, you cannot do everything instantaneously; it's never been done, everything instantaneously. We did, however, recognize that there was at least a chance of catastrophic success, if you will, to reverse the phrase, that you could in a given place or places have a victory that occurred well before reasonable people might have expected it, and that we needed to be ready for that; we needed to be ready with medicine, with food, with water. And, we have been. Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here."

"I don't believe anyone that I know in the administration ever said that Iraq had nuclear weapons."

"Today we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"

"You and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase immediate threat. I didn't, the president didn't. And it's become kind of folklore that that's what's happened."

"I'm not into this detail stuff. I'm more concepty."

"Look at me! I'm sweet and lovable!"

"[ Osama bin Laden is] either alive and well or alive and not too well or not alive."

"I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?"

"We're so conditioned as a people to think that a military campaign has to be cruise missiles and television images of airplanes dropping bombs, and that's just false. This is a totally different war. We need a new vocabulary. We need to get rid of old think and start thinking about this thing the way it really is."

"We know where they Iraq's WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat....I would also add, we saw from the air that there were dozens of trucks that went into that facility after the existence of it became public in the press and they moved things out. They dispersed them and took them away. So there may be nothing left. I don't know that. But it's way too soon to know. The exploitation is just starting."

"I didn't advocate invasion...I wasn't asked."

"After he saw what happened to Saddam Hussein, he (Gaddafi) did not want to be Saddam Hussein. He gave up his nuclear program."

"...it seems to me that it's up to all of us to try to tell the truth, to say what we know, to say what we don't know, and recognize that we're dealing with people that are perfectly willing to, to lie to the world to attempt to further their case and to the extent people lie of, ultimately they are caught lying and they lose their credibility and one would think it wouldn't take very long for that to happen dealing with people like this."

"As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time. Since the Iraq conflict began, the Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that they believe — it's a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously — but a rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished at this moment."

"I shouldn't get into ... this is diplomacy, and I don't do diplomacy."

"We do have a saying in America: if you're in a hole, stop digging ..... erm, I'm not sure I should have said that."

"What we are seeing is not the war in Iraq. What we're seeing is slices of the war in Iraq."

"Well, so be it. Nothing's perfect in life, so you have an election that's not quite perfect. Is it better than not having an election? You bet."

"It recalls to mind the statement by Winston Churchill, something to the effect that: I have benefited greatly from criticism, and at no time have I suffered a lack thereof."

"It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog."

"Those who follow orders to commit such crimes will be found and they will be punished. War crimes will be prosecuted. And it will be no excuse to say, 'I was just following orders.' Any official involved in such crimes will forfeit hope of amnesty or leniency with respect to past action."