Michael Chertoff People Quotations

We're going to have to go house to house in this city. We're going to have to check every single place to find people who may be alive and in need of assistance,

We face an extraordinary threat to our national security and physical safety of the American people of a character that, at least in my lifetime, we have never faced before,

We've got hundreds of thousands of people who have been displaced, ... This is unprecedented in this country's history and it's going to call for the kind of relief effort which we've been able to mount overseas, and we're now going to have to mount at home.

We've got hundreds of thousands of people who have been displaced,

There are people who have been sweltering in shelters, waiting for food and water,

making provisions for people in nursing homes or hospitals to get them out so they are out of harm's way and don't need to be rescued.

shocked people out of a bit of complacency.

Obviously, people feel strongly about their home communities and they tend to see their own risks to the exclusion of others. Our job is to balance.

We may have to force people to get together in terms of picking a particular type of technology and starting to build to that technology, as opposed to everybody exercising their right to buy their own system, you know, at will.

It is going to be about as ugly a scene as we've witnessed in this country, ... I really want to tell people that we have got some tough days ahead of us.

I think we need to prepare the country for what's coming, ... What's going to happen when we de-water and remove the water from New Orleans is we're going to uncover people who died, maybe hiding in houses, got caught by the flood, people whose remains are going to be found in the streets. . . . It is going to be about as ugly of a scene as I think you can imagine.

People have got to take some responsibility for preparing themselves, ... That means you get yourself three days' worth of food, three days' worth of water; you get yourself flashlights, batteries, either a hand-crank radio or a battery-powered radio, a first-aid kit precisely because you know it's going to take 48 to 72 hours to be able to fully service everyone.

We now know people need gas during emergencies and they have a responsibility - those people who run stations and ultimately those people who provide the fuel - have responsibility to hold up their end when a crisis comes.

We need to prepare the country for what's coming. We are going to uncover people who died in their homes. It's going to be an ugly scene.

We need to prepare the country for what's coming ... we are going to uncover people who died hiding in the houses, maybe got caught in floods, it is going to be as ugly a scene as you can imagine,

We need to prepare the country for what's coming, ... We are going to uncover people who died hiding in the houses, maybe got caught in floods. It is going to be as ugly a scene as you can imagine.

The president has been unambiguous in his mandate that we leave no stone unturned, and leave no efforts unexhausted in proceeding to do whatever we can to rescue people and alleviate suffering,

We are committed to cutting red tape and getting help to people who need it, ... We are getting real assistance in record time.

We are not going to be able to have people sitting in houses in the city of New Orleans for weeks and months while we de-water and clean this city,

When we remove the water from New Orleans, we're going to uncover people who died hiding in houses, who got caught by the flood, people whose remains will be found in the street, ... It is going to be about as ugly a scene as you can imagine.

We owe the American people a full accounting from all levels of government concerning what went right and what went wrong with the initial Katrina response,

We have to continue to use both low-tech and high-tech tools to assist our Border Patrol in patrolling this portion of terrain and protecting ourselves against people who want to sneak across.

We're going to uncover people who died, maybe hiding in houses, got caught by the flood, people whose remains are going to be found in the streets, ... It is going to be about as ugly of a scene as I think you can imagine.

This new People Access Security Service, or PASS system card, will be particularly useful for those citizens in border communities who regularly cross northern and southern borders every day as an integral part of their daily lives. We're talking about essentially like the kind of driver's license or other simple card identification that almost all of us carry in our wallets day in and day out.

We are very mindful of this. We haven't suspended the laws that govern the way in which people have to behave ethically and legally.

We are still in the emergency. People must take seriously the fact that we have enormous ongoing challenges which we have to address right now or we're going to continue to have serious problems,

At the end of the day, if we don't give people in any business some sense that they have consistent rules ... then we're creating a regulatory system that is doomed to failure.

I understand there are frustrations here, ... As the governor has acknowledged, we can't always get to people what we hope to get and as quickly as we hope to do it.

The whole point of this program is let people decide the fate of their own lives, ... And I think that avoids the whole issue of someone coming from outside and saying, 'You must do this' or 'You must do that.'

It would be enormously difficult if we were to attempt to control illegal immigration at the border without having some legal avenue to address the fact that there is a high demand for non-U.S. people to come in and perform certain kinds of jobs,

That's why we have asked our procurement people to look hard when the invoices come in for contracts, to make sure these are fair and reasonable prices and to make necessary adjustments to assure that there is appropriate performance and that the public is getting value for its money.

This is a system in desperate need, ... and people are rightly upset and distressed.

It's important to allow the new people who have the responsibility ... to have access to the information we need to do better, ... We don't want to sacrifice the real ability to get a full picture of Mike's experiences; we don't want to sacrifice that ability simply in order to make an image point.

I want to have the people who are present here on the ground

The cost of identifying all those people and sending them back would be stupendous. It would be billions and billions of dollars,

I knew I became more involved in operational matters than I would normally expect to be or want to be, given the fact that I had a battlefield commander on the ground, ... I am not a hurricane expert. I've got to rely on people to execute the details of the plan.

I'm kind of amazed you can write a report in which you reach your conclusions before you actually speak to the people who were involved in the decision-making process. It's kind of jumping to conclusions before the facts were gathered.

I hope that by doing what the state officials and mayors are doing now, are getting people who are invalids out of the way, encouraging people to leave early, that when the storm hits, there will be property damage but hopefully there won't be a lot of people to rescue,

Even the kinds of ingredients you can find in your own kitchen can be used to make bombs. So the problem is with the people and not with the tools.

We now have capabilities in science and technology that raise the very realistic possibility that a small group of terrorists could kill not only thousands of people, as they did on September 11th, but hundreds of thousands of people. And that has changed the dimension of the threat we face.

I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water.

These are not people who are larger than life. They took advantage of the fact that something that was unthinkable on September 10 became, unfortunately, all too thinkable on September 11.