David Letterman Quotes

There is a worry about a bomb being implanted in a human being and placed on an airplane. So, I think there is a lot to worry about.

If we announced threats [to airlines and flights] as we received them, we would be catering to the terrorists' goals.

September the 11th was a huge shock in the United States. It was the first time you had been hit at home in your own territory by terrorist on this scale.

Air travel survived decades of terrorism, including attacks which resulted in the deaths of everyone on the plane. It survived 9/11. It'll survive the next successful attack. The only real worry is that we'll scare ourselves into making air travel so onerous that we won't fly anymore.

As best I can tell there was no advance warning of the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, which was the first significant foreign terrorist activity in the U.S. No tip-offs that it was coming.

Osama bin Laden organized an attack that was carried out against the United States, New York, Pentagon, and the other aircraft, with 19 attackers, 19 guys with box cutters. An attack that probably cost almost nothing.

Scissors, screwdrivers and the like pose an unacceptable risk to flight crews as well passengers.

There will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months and the attack will be spectacular.

It's much harder to detect a lone wolf than it is somebody who's associated with a larger organization who's having planning meetings and making phone calls to people in the organization. And so that is really how the jihad has really developed in the United States.

Aircraft are always going to be something that terrorists are interested in because you bring down an airliner, you have drawn the world's attention.

People don't hijack planes anymore because that old system of hijacking in order to barter for a prison release or get to a different country no longer works, exactly, because 9/11 recoded the hostage's interpretation of a hijack. If a hijacker isn't trying to use the plane as a missile, then he is in danger of being killed by the hostages. There is no minor terror threat anymore. No mid-level terrorism.

Nike actually has a pair of shoes called Air-Turbulence. Try getting past airline security wearing those. Might as well call them Air-Osama.

A terrorist can attack any time, any place using any technique and you can't defend everywhere against every technique at every moment.

Most of the people who were responsible for 9/11 are now in custody or have been killed. But there are others, and they plot and they plan, and they hope to pull it off again. And while we have to be right 100 percent of the time, they only have to be right once. So there's no way to overreact to that.

Radical Islamic jihadists have a long-term vision. And if they have to stay in Europe to obtain a citizenship, to ultimately travel to the United States, and if it takes them five years or ten years, they're okay with that. History has proven that.

Today, few terrorist organizations still employ the 'al-Qaeda model' in which individuals travel to terrorist training camps overseas and then are deployed to the West to inflict atrocities.

Cairo has flights into JFK, and they're going to open another one at Dulles... As long as we have flights coming directly to the United States, I think it's putting Americans at risk.

I take ISIS at its word. When they said, in their words, 'We'll use and exploit the refugee crisis to infiltrate the West,' that concerns me.

We cannot be complacent about the determination of radical Islamic extremists to destroy our freedoms.

If ISIS strikes, it's going to strike Americans - not Republicans or Democrats. This is not partisan politics.

The policy issue is this: the TSA should focus less on big data commercial background checks of passengers, which have proven unpopular and unreliable, and more time on securing flights by screening passengers for weapons and explosives.

I flew everywhere for the first 10 years of my career, and I started to not like commercial transport. I just don't feel safe.

We know that ISIS desires operationally to use the Syrian refugee program to infiltrate countries, to use migrant flows as a way to gain an operational foothold in other countries.

The ghost caliphate will be a virtual organization; it'll be decentralised, with no leadership, and it will just encourage people to keep acting now that the caliphate's gone, that individuals should go do self-starting jihad. Get a gun, get an improvised weapon, take your car, and carry out the jihad.

I worry about international terror as a method for bringing about political change or sociological change in different countries. And this concerns me because our homeland is not - we see now, is not immune from this kind of dastardly attack. And so I worry about that a lot.