Michael Chertoff Country Quotations

I think we need to prepare the country for what's coming,

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.

We need to prepare the country for what's coming,

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,

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 are emphatically behind the idea that we must in this country be full partners with the rest of the world in a robust and free-flowing pattern of travel and trade.

I can't tell you what the numbers are going to be, but I think we need to prepare the country for what's coming.

We don't really have the ability to enforce the law with respect to illegal work in this country in a way that's truly effective...We haven't been able to require every employer to enter a system in which they check the work status of their employees and determine whether they're legal, and without that, we don't really have the ability to enforce the law with respect to illegal work in this country in a way that's truly effective. And that would be the single greatest additional weapon we could use if we're serious about tackling this problem.

The larger point is this: We've invested over half a billion dollars in New York since this department was stood up. We've given New York more money, by more than double, than any other city in the country.

So that's why I said, if you look at the average, you would see the money New York got this year was in line with the average across the prior three years and substantially more, by a country mile, than the money given to any other city.

And I have to say, I agree with some of the criticisms that some have made about that state program which allocates the grant money on a very rigid formula all across the country, with a certain percentage to each state.

So people have to decide. Do they want to have the security? Do they want to continue to plug the gap [in border security] that GAO has identified and recognize that there will be some costs to doing that? Or do we want to make sure that business isn't hampered and that people can move back and forth readily, and recognize that, if we don't put some barriers in place, we're going to wind up with dangerous people coming into the country?

The fact that we have not had a terrorist attack in this country in the last six years is not a cause for complacency or a time to celebrate the end of the struggle. The threat is not going away. The enemy has not lost interest. ...Fundamentally, we're in a struggle about ideology. Terrorists want to remake the world in their own image and it is the image that is intolerant of the kinds of institutions that we cherish.