Bill Frist Quotes

Our democratic values also include - and our national security demands - open and transparent government. Some information obviously needs to be protected. And since his first days in office, President Obama has worked to strike the proper balance between the security the American people deserve and the openness our democratic society expects.

The U.K. government has a responsibility to keep secrets in some circumstances. It also has a responsibility not to abuse that power for other purposes.

This is a generation weaned on Watergate, and there is no presumption of innocence and no presumption of good intentions. Instead, there is a presumption that, without relentless scrutiny, the government will misbehave.

People are entitled to believe the government is constantly lying to them, but it isn't.

All officers of the Intelligence Community, and especially its most senior officer, must conduct themselves in a manner that earns and retains the public trust. The American people are uncomfortable with government activities that do not take place in the open, subject to public scrutiny and review.

You can't believe the government - on anything. And you especially can't believe them when they're talking about important stuff.

No commission created in this town has automatic credibility. You have to earn it.

The root of the problem [secrecy in government] is not so much that our people have lost confidence in government, but that government has demonstrated time and again its lack of confidence in the people.

It appears to the American people that the government is intent on prying into every nook and cranny of people’s private lives, while at the same time doing all that it can to block access to government information that would inform the American people what is being done in their name.

Why is there so much resistance among people who work in the Government to the seemingly obvious fact that, in our democracy, if the Government lies, it will eventually get caught

The problem is that the American public is suspicious of executive power shrouded in secrecy. In the absence of an official picture of what our government is doing, and by what authority, many in the public fill the void by envisioning the worst.

I work for the British people. I do not gather intelligence so the government can lie to the British people.

The way things are supposed to work is that we're supposed to know virtually everything about what they [the government] do: that's why they're called public servants. They're supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that's why we're called private individuals.

Excessive administration secrecy... feeds conspiracy theories and reduces the public's confidence in government.

As long as the government's actions are secret, it cannot be held accountable. A government for the people and by the people should be transparent to the people.

These are the elements of an emerging order that may prove to be as dangerous as any fundamentalism that history has produced. For in a world where anything or anyone can be owned, manipulated, and exploited for profit, everything and everyone will be.

Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix.

No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable, without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.

It's easy to imagine an infinite number of situations where the government might legitimately give out false information.

Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only "order" that governments have ever maintained. True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests. In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth.... Thus the entire arsenal of governments - laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons - is strenuously engaged in "harmonizing" the most antagonistic elements in society.

Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order.

I have no doubt that the nation has suffered more from undue secrecy than from undue disclosure. The government takes good care of itself.

I have taken advantage of other people's weaknesses in order to cover my own.

One of the problems we have as a government is our inability to keep secrets. And it costs us, in terms of our relationship with other governments, in terms of the willingness of other intelligence services to work with us, in terms of revealing sources and methods. And all of those elements enter into some of these leaks.

We do not believe that if you cut back what government does you diminish its authority. On the contrary, a government that did less, and therefore did better, would strengthen its authority.