Even the Soviet Union, with its huge nuclear arsenal, was a threat that could be deterred by the prospect of retaliation. But suicide bombers cannot be deterred. They can only be annihilated – preemptively and unilaterally, if necessary.

Without a tutor to help me in the study of Marxism-Leninism, I was no more than a theorist and, of course, had total confidence in the Soviet Union.

Some have argued that confronting the threat from Iraq could detract from the war against terror. To the contrary, confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror.

Iran has little capacity to deploy force. Its strategic doctrines are defensive, designed to deter invasion long enough for diplomacy to set it.

America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

When I was 18, I went to the Soviet Union. I kept hearing that America was planning to bomb them – lots of bombs were going to come down on these people. I went there not knowing anything, except that I thought the whole thing was stupid and that I wanted to see who these people were that we were going to bomb.

You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

Al Qaeda is still a threat. We cannot pretend somehow that because Barack Hussein Obama got elected as president, suddenly everything is going to be OK.

Why, I’d horse-whip you if I had a horse.

I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man.

Sir one more comment like that and I will strangle you with my microphone wire!

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

Why should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction and expenditure?

The coward only threatens when he is safe.

Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.

You will kill 10 of our men, and we will kill 1 of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.

I am well aware that there are prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union, including some who have said they have chosen to resist the law because of religious reasons.

Take it from someone who fled the Iron Curtain: I know what happens when you give the Russians a green light.

Twenty-six million Russians died in the defense of their homeland against the Nazis.

When I was in the White House, I was confronted with the challenge of the Cold War. Both the Soviet Union and I had 30,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy the entire earth and I had to maintain the peace.

We cannot let terrorists hold this nation hostile or hold our allies hostile.

NATO was constructed on the – with the reason, whether one believes it or not, that it was going to defend Western Europe from Russian assault. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, that reason was gone. So, first question: why does NATO exist?

The Iranian regime, in my mind, is the single most enduring threat to stability and peace in the Middle East.

When Britain and the U.S. invaded Iraq, it was with the reasonable expectation that it was going to increase the threat of terror, as it has.

The United States is afraid of China; it is not a military threat to anyone and is the least aggressive of all the major military powers.

Sooner or later, jihadist-style terror and WMD are going to come together and the consequences could be horrendous.

Everybody has a job to do. There are people in Iraq on both sides of this war who do what they do for religious reasons, and they feel with God on their side. Some people are good at annihilating people. Maybe that’s their gift.

Following the missile crisis, detente started to gain ground between the United States and the Soviet Union, so the international political climate improved after that.

The professed function of the nuclear weapons on each side is to prevent the other side from using their nuclear weapons. If that’s all it is, then we’ve gotta as: how many nuclear weapons do you need to do that?

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

I think it is important for Europe to understand that even though I am president and George Bush is not president, Al Qaeda is still a threat.

The threat and use of violence is stimulating nuclear proliferation along with jihadi terrorism.

Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.

China is certainly an important player in the global economy, and a widespread AIDS epidemic would threaten that growth.

Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies – or else? The chain reaction of evil – hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars – must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

The Hell’s Angels try not to do anything halfway, and anyone who deals in extremes is bound to cause trouble, whether he means to or not. This, along with a belief in total retaliation for any offense or insult, is what makes the Hell’s Angels unmanageable for the police and morbidly fascinating to the general public.

If the Soviet Union let another political party come into existence, they would still be a one-party state, because everybody would join the other party.

I’ll beat him so bad he’ll need a shoehorn to put his hat on.

Castro couldn’t even go to the bathroom unless the Soviet Union put the nickel in the toilet.

When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans – an avian flu pandemic.

Nature abhors annihilation.

It is well known that the Soviet Union closely regulates all organizations and movements, including religion.