Tim Kaine Quotes

In the history of Wikileaks, nobody has claimed that the material being put out is not authentic.

What do you do when other countries' intelligence agencies give you information and you aren't entirely certain about its source? Simply ignore it? That's impossible. We have a duty to guarantee the safety of our citizens.

Unlike with the majority of library books, when you enter a term into a search engine there is no guarantee that what you will find is authoritative, accurate or even vaguely true.

Facts from paper are not the same as facts from people. The reliability of the people giving you the facts is as important as the facts themselves.

Get in the habit of vetting your research as you go - particularly research conducted online. Verify facts from multiple reputable sources before you record them.

The quality of the data and information of a social science, economics or government study is inversely proportional to its importance and social significance.

Just because a document is classified does not mean that it is truthful.

WikiLeaks has been publishing for ten years, and in those ten years, we have published ten million documents, several thousand individual publications, several thousand different sources, and we have never got it wrong.

Wikileaks is providing information on what ambassadors are sending to Washington and things like that. Maybe some of that has a right to some kind of secrecy, but there is a heavy burden and I think its pretty hard to meet. I haven't read everything from Wikileaks by any means but the parts that I have read and seen I think are things the public should know.

Reporters are faced with the daily choice of painstakingly researching stories or writing whatever people tell them. Both approaches pay the same.

I think that the media should stop with this unnamed source stuff, put names on a piece of paper and print it. If people aren't willing to put their name next to a quote, then the quote shouldn't be listed, period.

Authentic sources. Many authentic sources.

When we were doing the "Angel Dust" thing we got information from the National Institute of Drug Abuse because we knew that if we went out and said something about angel dust people were going to ask questions about it and we wanted to be sure we had all the information to deal with it when those questions came up. So it's all a question of being as prepared as possible out front, so that if you are going to deal with information it'll be correct. A lot of people won't check it out but some people will.

I think that could be perhaps a little misleading and even our statistics can mislead people at the times though they are not misleading in themselves. It is just that people get mislead

Sometimes you're just interviewing someone and you're thinking the entire time, How can I get through this really quickly? Because I know this isn't gonna make it. This person is either too long-winded or deathly boring, or they don't have the point of view that supports what you're trying to do in the piece. Or often people misrepresent themselves on the phone - what they're willing to say to you then, they're not willing to say in person.

I dream of a world where the truth is what shapes people's politics, rather than politics shaping what people think is true.

I don't think I would worry about an oversaturation of information if it was indeed information. It is the slovenly, hasty traffic in cliché and sensationalism and bad reasoning that bothers me. I love finding arcane primary texts on the web. The people who think to put them up are heroes of mine.

We have to uphold a free press and freedom of speech - because, in the end, lies and misinformation are no match for the truth.

Knowing the identity of the leaker helps you analyze the likelihood that the material is real.

There has to a certain responsibility, whether it's TV news, online news, to sort out opinion from fact.

A lot of stuff in Wikipedia is not true, and that goes for a lot of people. I sometimes think, "How can that happen?" But Wikipedia is maintained by people, and everybody can add stuff to it.

If we really care about safety we would close down WikiLeaks. We would treat the people at WikiLeaks as enemy combatants. We would declare that the kind of thing this private did is treason. WikiLeaks is not a fun and games event. WikiLeaks undermines profoundly the ability of the United States to work around the world. Why would you, if you were a foreigner thinking about helping the United States, why would you confide anything to an American when you know that it could end up in The New York Times based on some leak?

I always tell my fans that are closest to me, if it's not coming from my mouth, my website, or my appointed person, then it's generally not true. Or it's an exaggeration.

Part of what it is to be scientifically-literate is how you think about information that's presented in front of you. I think that's the great challenge. You have people who believe they do know how to think about the information, but don't, and they're in the position of power and legislation. You can't base a society on non-objectively verifiable truth. Otherwise, it's a fantasy land and science is the pathway to those emerging truths that are hard-earned and that some have taken decades, if not centuries, to emerge from experiments all around the world.

Most of what is done I think is to kept secret so the public won't know. The same is true of what Wikileaks exposed.