Top 20 John F. Kelly Quotes

I think we could very easily suffer a seriously catastrophic cyber event.

Marines dying or being seriously wounded is commonplace in combat.

I work for one man. His name is Donald Trump. He has told me one thing: ‘Secure the border.’

My fear was of being offered a job that would be kind of a full-time position at a veterans organization or even in the government… I’d prefer to not be that, to come up the Beltway every day.

Given the opportunity to do another 9/11, our vicious enemy would do it today, tomorrow, and every day thereafter. I don’t know why they hate us, and I frankly don’t care, but they do hate us and are driven irrationally to our destruction.

We are at war and, like it or not, that is a fact. It is not Bush’s war, and it is not Obama’s war. It is our war, and we can’t run away from it.

If you want to get into the United States, the best way, I believe, is to ride the network. There is no convergence between, say, the criminal networks and the Islamic extremist networks.

The comforting news for every American is that our men and women in uniform, and every Marine, is as good today as any in our history.

I grew up in Boston in a very, very, very Marine town. So back in my neighborhood in Boston, a working-class neighborhood, when you got your draft notice, you went down, and you took your draft physical. And then, if you passed it, you joined the Marine Corps.

There will be no use of military forces in immigration. There will be no – repeat, no – mass deportations.

I’m not for the mass collection of data. I go the other way.

I’m pretty committed to the Constitution.

We have a saying in the Marine Corps and that is ‘no better friend, no worse enemy, than a U.S. Marine.’ We always hope for the first, friendship, but are certainly more than ready for the second.

I guess, over time, I had convinced myself that I could imagine what it would be like to lose a son or daughter. You try to imagine it so that you can write the right kind of letters or form the right words to try to comfort. But you can’t even come close. It is unimaginable.

If you were to build a wall from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, you would still have to back that wall up with patrolling by human beings, sensors, observation devices.

I do not believe that the Sunni tribes have gone over to the Islamic State.

I don’t agree with registering people based on ethnicity or religion.

I’ve learned that, in many cases, people say, ‘I want ground truth,’ and they don’t really mean it. There are warts all over this organization, as there are in many organizations, but you just have to tell truth to power and let the chips fall where they may.

My first time overseas was taking 10,000 tons of beer to Vietnam.

Unless confronted by an immediate, visible, or uncomfortable crisis, our nation’s tendency is to take the security of the Western Hemisphere for granted.