Arianna Huffington Quotes

You can't fire anybody in Government; everyone blames the system. Look what is happening in NASA. Now we have to truck out these 200-plus audits out of the closet because we had a disaster [the Challenger], and we still can't find someone to fire.

Everything is secret. They [child welfare administrators] claim that is for the protection of the children. But it’s for the protection of their own negligence.

Congress must go further to protect the right to privacy, to end the NSA's dragnet surveillance of ordinary Americans, to make the intelligence community more transparent and accountable.

God forbid we keep a couple secrets in this day and age!

Everyone needs to understand that my work addresses existing problems, and one of the crucial problems in Russia today is corruption.

Everyone knows about the substantive issues of concern, like federal health care, but very little is said about the process, the lack of accountability.

We must have government, but we must watch them like a hawk.

An urgent need exists for regular and responsible Congressional scrutiny of the Central Intelligence Agency. Such scrutiny is essential… Our form of government…is based on a system of checks and balances. If this system gets seriously out of balance at any point the whole system is jeopardized and the way is opened for the growth of tyranny…CIA is freed from practically every ordinary form of Congressional check. I agree that an intelligence agency must maintain complete secrecy to be effective. However, there is a profound difference between an essential degree of secrecy to achieve a specific purpose and secrecy for the mere sake of secrecy.

We need reform. We need more transparency between those who lobby us and ourselves in the Congress.

Oversight now is defined as going after political appointees.

The effective supervision and surveillance of the lobbyist remains as the continuing challenge to the people and the Congress.

Oversight was not meant to be comfortable.

When you are dealing with the United States Government and the Department of Justice you have to always be looking over your shoulder.

We don’t have to choose between preserving privacy and preventing terrorism. We do have to decide how much oversight and accountability there should be when the government conducts surveillance on its citizens.

All bureaucracies have to be weeded and watched.

In business, you learn from mistakes. In government, they never do.

Independence sounds good in theory, but in practice, it is mutually exclusive with accountability. The more independence you give a prosecutor, the less you make that prosecutor accountable to the public and regular checks and balances.

What makes a politician accountable is not that there are millions of people who vote, but that there are procedures of government that force him to account for himself.

Citizens need to know how their countries are being run so that they can hold governments and big business to account.

Wikileaks is a democratizing force. Its giving individuals access to decisions and thinking by their representatives and in a democracy that ought to be reflexive.

Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy.

It's my job as President and Congress’s job to maker sure that there’s some rules of the road that people are going to abide by and that we’ve got transparency and accountability that this stuff is being posted and one of the things that we are going to do is put together an independent board on the recovery package…

The great thing about Watergate is, is that the system worked. The American system worked. The press did its job. We did what we were supposed to do.

The American people demand results, not rhetoric, especially when it comes to national security issues.

Openness and participation are antidotes to surveillance and control.