A biography for Erik Princehasn’t been written yet.
“I'm going to teach high school. History and economics. I may even coach wrestling. Hey, Indiana Jones taught school, too.”
“My father was a brilliant inventor and businessman. He taught me to appreciate the opportunities that America offers to innovators.”
“I started a private equity fund and we invest in energy, mining, agriculture kind of things in Africa.”
“If I could send a message back to my younger self, it would be: Do not work for the State Department at all.”
“I believe there is significant overreach by the NSA in how it monitors American citizens.”
“Russia is basically Italy with nuclear weapons.”
“When someone needs copper, or wood or an ag product, and they invest capital somewhere to make that happen, and people get jobs from that, and that good gets introduced to the world stage and it gets traded and moved, the whole world benefits.”
“America is way too quick to trade freedom for the illusion of security. Whether it's allowing the NSA to go way too far in what it intercepts of our personal data, to our government monitoring of everything domestically and spending way more than we should.”
“We have the finest officers in the world, but it seems like once they become generals it is a self-licking ice cream cone of who gets promoted and who gets approved to join that club. No one thinks outside the box.”
“President Trump should appoint a special presidential envoy and empower them to wage an unconventional war against Taliban and Daesh forces, to hold the corrupt officials accountable and to negotiate with their Afghan counterparts and the Afghan Taliban that are willing to reconcile with Kabul.”
“Any time you employ thousands of people, some people do dumb things.”
“After 9/11, a few hundred CIA and Special Operations personnel, backed by airpower and Afghan militias, devastated Taliban and al-Qaeda forces. That effort has since turned into a conventional Pentagon nation-building exercise and gone backward.”
“Readiness is an oft-mentioned - but frequently ignored - necessity.”
“We have done great work for the U.S. government.”
“Developing good investments in Africa is by and large the best for the people of Africa that have a job, that have electricity, that might have clean water, that might have those things that we in the West take horribly for granted.”
“Sometimes motorists do irrational things.”
“I can relate to ranchers and roughnecks and professional game guides and farmers and homemakers.”
“Everyone says they support our troops and thank you for their service, if they really want to support their troops, demand better. Demand that their sacrifice not be wasted. That we not just muddle along as some of the generals have called for.”
“I represented everything Democrats loathed.”
“It's amazing how many countries run their embassies as commercial outposts to promote businessmen from their country.”