War & Peace Quote by Dick Cheney

Cheney’s sentence is built like a trap that closes quietly: start with certainty, paint an unspeakable picture, then make “extraordinary measures” sound like mere administrative hygiene. “I’m absolutely convinced” isn’t argument; it’s authority. It asks you to treat doubt as irresponsibility, to swap evidence for resolve. The scenario he chooses - “a terrorist in the middle of one of our cities with a nuclear weapon” - is cinematic on purpose. It compresses fear into a single, portable image: anonymous enemy, familiar streets, instant apocalypse. You don’t deliberate about that; you flinch.

The subtext is the post-9/11 bargain Cheney helped define: if the threat is existential and imminent, then the normal rules are a luxury item. Notice the slippery phrasing: the “idea” is real, the “threat we face now” is real. It’s a rhetorical move that immunizes itself against the pesky demand for probability. Low-likelihood, high-consequence events become policy drivers, and the inability to disprove them becomes license to expand state power.

Context does the rest of the work. Coming from a vice president in the early War on Terror, this isn’t a private anxiety; it’s a justification framework for detention, surveillance, interrogation, and secrecy. “Extraordinary” is the euphemism doing the heavy lifting - it implies temporary exception, but it also normalizes exception as the new baseline. The line is less about one hypothetical bomb than about manufacturing political permission: fear as a renewable resource, consensus by alarm, governance by emergency.