Hillary Clinton Quotes

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

You have multiple intelligence agencies. They all ultimately report to the director of national intelligence but, you know, it never comes in neat packages. So you have to make judgments on what you have, and it's not easy to do.

An espionage organization is a collector: it collects raw information. That gets processed by a machinery that is supposed to resolve its reliability, and to present a finished product.

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

The Pentagon suffers from too much Intelligence. They can't use what they get because there is too much collected. It would almost be better if they didn't have it because it's difficult to find out what's important.

It is my job to know the difference between information and intelligence.

People, I am actually fairly smart. Why has this not occurred to anyone? The information is all out there, if you go looking for it, and the classified stuff just comes from analyzing the unclassified stuff and connecting the dots.

That's the nature of the intelligence business. You have to work with what you can get your hands on, but it is.. and in fact it's more an art form than it is a science, and you have to continually work the problem, continually try.

The impulse to collect data preceded the ability to make sense of it. People facing a complicated problem measure whatever they can easily measure. But the measurements by themselves don’t lead to understanding.

Intelligence collection has its place—no question—… But no matter how important collection is, in the short and even the long run, it just doesn’t cost very much.

We… need to recalibrate our expectations for what we access as actionable intelligence. We need to lower that threshold to the appropriate level and we need to have a higher threshold tolerance for pain in the event that we miscalculate or things go wrong or people get caught or something happens.

Intelligence involves analysis of raw reports, not merely their enumeration or weighing them by the pound. Analysis, in turn, involves finding independent means of corroborating the reports.

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

In politics, information is superabundant—what is needed is judgement and selectivity in dealing with that information.

In the intelligence business you are almost never completely wrong or completely right.

A great many decisions just can’t be made with confidence because the data just doesn’t exist …. [however] just because we don’t have the information doesn’t mean that we can’t get it.

The trouble with our intelligence is that we have a bunch of social scientists doing the analysis when the world is dominated by fanatics.

An issue that really concerned me when I was on the House Intelligence Committee was the quality of analysis.

Inside all the computers of any large corporation is every decision that gets made. But people spend a huge amount of time trying to find the correct piece of information.

The first week in intelligence school, you learn there are only two conditions in life. There is policy success, or there is intel failure. There is no other condition in life.

We can only query against that which we have collected. And so if someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interest reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home, but there will be nothing show up because we have no record of them.

I'm not sure people would think of me in this light, but frankly, what I enjoyed most about Bain & Company, the consulting firm, was the analytical process of solving tough problems.

When developing intelligence assessments, initial tactical reports often require additional collection and validation.

Classified information includes much more than the actual 'secrets' acquired. It includes how they were acquired and the process by which related analyses were made.

I learnt early that always being analytical is important for a business. Being analytical as an attitude is more important than just having the aptitude.