Richard A. Clarke Quotes

You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

Knowledge consists in understanding the evidence that establishes the fact, not in the belief that it is a fact.

We’ve learned our lesson. We are not going to take any more intelligence at face value.

You have to put together bits and pieces of information before you can draw overall conclusions.

Intelligence, like any other aspect of national security, has to be under civilian control.

I don't think the intelligence reports are all that hot. Some days I get more out of New York Times.

Intelligence gathered by this government leaves no doubt

As an intelligence analyst you have to tell the president what you know, what you think you know and what you don’t know.

The National Security Agency: Where Intelligence Goes To Work

SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel.

The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.

Because of the terrorist threat, the FBI and CIA have become as important as the military in preserving our freedom. Yet while thanking our military is standard practice in American life, no one thinks of thanking the FBI, the CIA, or the rest of the intelligence community for keeping us safe since 9/11.

You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk.

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.

It's necessary to understand what real intelligence work is. It will never cease. It's absolutely essential that we have it. At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy governmental curiosity. It brings to a strong government what it needs to know. It's the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret.

If you look back today over the last 25 years, it is a fact that we have had a progressive degeneration of our intelligence community in general; in particular in the field of human intelligence.

The NSA's business is 'information dominance,' the use of other people's secrets to shape events.

Policymakers have to make judgments based on the best intelligence they get.

When I talk with my students, I introduce a process of work I call the three R's: First comes research, then real world exploration, and finally, and perhaps most important, a fact-checking review of all that has been written.

We need to be able to make decisions even though part of the information that we have is incorrect and wrong.

There is still much to be done by our intelligence community to bring its achievements up to an acceptable level.

The shadowy world of foreign intelligence-gathering – the American government’s most secret and least accountable enterprise – is now the Bush administration’s main legal weapon in the war on terrorism.

Americans don’t spy on Americans.

Abolish the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.