Paul Wolfowitz's Quotes

The use of force to liberate people is very different from the use of force to suppress or control them, or even to defeat them.

You can't win if you're chasing the wrong problem.

Before September 11, terrorism was viewed as something ugly but you lived with it.

Democracy is a process.

For one thing I tend not to see myself in various moulds that people fit me into.

For the private sector to flourish, special privilege must give way to equal opportunity and equal risk for all.

Generally speaking, the stronger the connection between the financing and the ultimate beneficiary, the better the result.

History is just littered with problems that were solved that were supposed to be impossible.

I certainly don't like a label that suggests I believe that the military is the solution to most of the world's problems.

I like globalization; I want to say it works, but it is hard to say that when six hundred million people are slipping backwards.

I mean, we're going to probably debate the Iraq war for at least as long as I'm alive.

I think it's a mistake to rely too much on any one economic factor. It's why investors try to spread their portfolio round.

I think, in the longer view of things, there is a very powerful pull in the direction of participatory government.

I told my father I had to try political science for a year. He thought I was throwing my life away.

I'm constantly asking for alternative views on most things that come to me.

I've met quite a few dictators up close and personal in my life.

If greater openness is a key to economic success, I believe there is increasingly a need for openness in the political sphere as well.

It is kind of nice to have a common purpose.

It's a very bad thing when people exterminate other people, and people persecute minorities.

Jobs are a priority for every country. Doing more to improve regulation and help entrepreneurs is the key to creating jobs - and more growth.

Look, I think the public generally understands that what's at stake in Afghanistan is American security, number one.

One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war.

Poles understand perhaps better than anyone the consequences of making toothless warnings to brutal tyrants and terrorist regimes.

Answers are what we are trying to get at; search is a process by which you may be able to get answers, but it's not the end goal. It's a mechanism.

Any tool can be used badly.

Computers do the calculating to allow people to transform the world.

I couldn't tell you in any detail how my computer works. I use it with a layer of automation.

Maths should be more practical and more conceptual, but less mechanical.

Calculating does not equal mathematics. It's a subsection of it. In years gone by it was the limiting factor, but computers now allow you to make the whole of mathematics more intellectual.

Every math curriculum in the world is based on the idea of hand-calculating, and most of what you're teaching is how to calculate. And I think the resistance to this is very variable.

Maths is fundamentally a different process in education than it is in the real world. There is an insistence that we do maths by hand when most of it is done by computers. The idea that you have to do everything by hand before you can operate a computer is nonsense.

One thing is for sure: most of the people admitting candidates to universities for technical subjects are pretty dissatisfied with the level of math education.

There's certainly an issue of helping teachers to move to a new way of thinking about things, but there are also new methodologies one can employ. You don't have to have the teacher teaching the whole lesson. There are remote links, there are specialists, you can pull them in. There are things you couldn't do twenty years ago that you can do now.