Erik Prince

China trading with its neighbours and building infrastructure brings only benefits.

I can relate to ranchers and roughnecks and professional game guides and farmers and homemakers.

I identify with Wyoming, I love the state of Wyoming, I love the people. It's a fantastic state - people that live in rugged conditions and who make their living doing things in the outdoors.

I'm going to teach high school. History and economics. I may even coach wrestling. Hey, Indiana Jones taught school, too.

I give people ideas on how to solve intractable problems.

My dad built his business by providing products he figured the customers would want.

Some of the most dedicated, most passionate people I've ever met have been part of the United States armed forces.

If I could send a message back to my younger self, it would be: Do not work for the State Department at all.

I've certainly been mortared and rocketed a few times.

I think everybody wanted to help the U.S. government in some way after 9/11.

I started a private equity fund and we invest in energy, mining, agriculture kind of things in Africa.

If the Chinese are sensitive about anything, it's not having their people die.

You pretty much remove the entire political texture from Blackwater when you come to China. What they look at is our 100 per cent success rate.

I believe there is significant overreach by the NSA in how it monitors American citizens.

I will support vigorously whoever commits to reduce the size of government the most.

The left wants to protect social programs, the right wants to protect defense and intelligence spending and all the rest. I say the defense and intelligence world will be better off with a smaller budget. They would be less encumbered by bloat and able to maneuver the way they used to be able and not trip over themselves.

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.

Training for any difficult job is essential.

The video game industry is constantly evolving. The sheer creativity matched with cutting-edge technologies gives me the comfort that innovation is alive and well in America.

My father was a brilliant inventor and businessman. He taught me to appreciate the opportunities that America offers to innovators.

Video games are an exciting medium. The creativity of design, the technology and the interaction represent the best of American innovation.

Limited government is best.

I'm a pretty stubborn guy. I don't quit too easily.

I'm a business guy just trying to make - provide great services to the customers that need us.

I'm a strong supporter of the military.

I loved being a SEAL. I loved working with those kind of guys and a sense of mission, and Blackwater was started to continue that sense of mission.

I know a lot of people in the aviation business, particularly ones who will fly to places where your boots get dirty when you get out of the airplane.

I think the diplomatic-security needs in Iraq were an anomaly. There's never been a bulge of requirements that large ever before.

In Joe Yorio you find a guy who's smarter at business than I am. I'm an entrepreneur and idea guy; he's a professional businessman.

One of the real core competencies of Blackwater, or companies like Blackwater, is we can operate in difficult places without any outside support.

Unfortunately, I kind of split between Virginia and living in an airplane. I travel a lot.

Blackwater's work with the CIA began when we provided specialized instructors and facilities that the Agency lacked. In the years that followed, the company became a virtual extension of the CIA because we were asked time and again to carry out dangerous missions, which the Agency either could not or would not do in-house.

I live in Loudoun County, and the counties surrounding Washington, D.C., have the highest per-capita income in the country. Not because they create wealth, but because they suck wealth from the rest of the country, and that system needs to be shaken up.

The establishment, rigged, cozy system inside the beltway is not America.

We have kind of turned our back on the fact that hard work, sacrifice, risk-taking, innovation, is what made America great.

I like the fact that Donald Trump has been in the private sector. I like that he's had to make a payroll. I like that he's had to do projects.

I wish we had been doing diplomatic security in Benghazi. I can tell you that Benghazi would not have happened if Blackwater were on the job there.

I love the U.S. military. I want them to be the most effective and the most cost-effective and I think there is so much spending and so much bloat and so much bureaucracy that it actually hinders them from having a lot of the mission accomplishments that they should.

I've done dumb things.

Some people will always hate the name Blackwater. They might not like me.

Bad things usually don't happen by themselves in Iraq.

I'm an American working for America. Anything we do is to support U.S. policy. You know the definition of a mercenary is a professional soldier that works in the pay of a foreign army. I'm an American working for America.

I represented everything Democrats loathed.

I'm not sure whether a person can really gauge the quality of his work by the enemies he's made, but if I somehow upset Hamas and the Taliban and Henry Waxman, I must have done something right.

I never intended to be a defense contractor in the first place.

I built Blackwater to stay connected to the SEAL teams and to serve that whole community.

The greatest threat to our freedom and prosperity is not al-Qaida, the Taliban, Iran or even China. It's an idea, the idea that we can spend our way out of our problems without tightening our belt and paring down the very bloated government.

Sometimes motorists do irrational things.

We're very excited about Africa - it can be the breadbasket of the world.

Let's stop trading freedom for the illusion of security.