“It could have happened to anybody. People are always saying, 'He didn't apologize.' I don't think I did anything wrong that I need to apologize for. It was a clean hit.”

2000s
Context: There is nothing in American experience or in American political life or in our culture that suggests we want to use hard power. But what we have found over the decades is that unless you do have hard power — and here I think you're referring to military power — then sometimes you are faced with situations that you can't deal with.
I mean, it was not soft power that freed Europe. It was hard power. And what followed immediately after hard power? Did the United States ask for dominion over a single nation in Europe? No. Soft power came in the Marshall Plan. Soft power came with American GIs who put their weapons down once the war was over and helped all those nations rebuild. We did the same thing in Japan.
So our record of living our values and letting our values be an inspiration to others I think is clear. And I don't think I have anything to be ashamed of or apologize for with respect to what America has done for the world.
We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we've done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home to seek our own, you know, to seek our own lives in peace, to live our own lives in peace. But there comes a time when soft power or talking with evil will not work where, unfortunately, hard power is the only thing that works.

Response to a question by George Carey (a former Archbishop of Canterbury), after the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (26 January 2003), as to whether the US had given due consideration to the use of "soft power" vs "hard power" against the regime of Saddam Hussein; this has sometimes been portrayed as an accusation by an Archbishop of Canterbury that the United States was engaged in "empire building", in which Powell's response has been paraphrased:

Source: The Boyfriend List: 15 Guys, 11 Shrink Appointments, 4 Ceramic Frogs and Me, Ruby Oliver

2010s, 2010

AP, July 9, 2008 http://thinkprogress.org/2008/07/09/perino-boxer/

2003-03-18
Good Morning America
ABC
Television
[2004-02-25, Peter, Hart, Bill O'Reilly's "Apology": Still Spinning in the 'No Spin Zone', Common Dreams, http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-10.htm]
on finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq

Associated Press interview, , quoted in [2014-11-19, Bill Cosby on Rape Allegations: ‘I Don’t Talk About It’, Maya Rhodan, Time, http://time.com/3596545/cosby-responds-rape-allegations-ap-video/, 2014-11-24]
Post-interview on-camera remarks, requesting they not air his interviewer's attempt to ask him about comedian Hannibal Buress' comedy routine about multiple women having alleged that Cosby drugged and raped them:
Brett Zongker: I have to ask about your name coming up in the news recently regarding this comedian—
Bill Cosby: No, no, we don't answer that.
Brett Zongker: OK. I just wanted to ask you if you wanted to respond about whether any of that was true.
Bill Cosby: There's no response.
Brett Zongker: I'm gonna ask you, if— With the persona that people know about Bill Cosby, should they believe anything differently about what—?
Bill Cosby: There is no comment about that.
Brett Zongker: OK.
Bill Cosby: And I'll tell you why.
Brett Zongker: OK.
Bill Cosby: I think you were told. I don't want to compromise your integrity, but um, we don't— I don't talk about it.

Source: Ida B. . . and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World