James Comey Quotes

The law does not distinguish terribly well between real secrets and sort-of secrets, especially in an age when the instinct to stamp “classified” runs rampant.

The secrecy stamp … has been used to withhold information which in 99 ½ percent of the cases would present no danger to national security.

We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows

An obsession with secrecy persists in leading industrial countries.

It is up to the government to keep the government's secrets.

No less a philosopher than Chief Justice Burger was outraged by Ellsberg's publication of classified documents. They belonged to the Government, Burger reasoned, and Ellsberg had no more right to give them to the people than he would have to filch another man's property off a taxicab seat. The Government, of course, commonly leaks classified documents when it deems publication convenient to manipulate public opinion to its advantage. Only the Government, it seems, has a legal right to manipulate opinion with hot documents.

Some information has to remain in the privy of the office of the Prime Minister and the ministers for the proper administration of government.

Bureaucracy always seeks the path of least disclosure.

Our agency (the Central Intelligence Agency) is the last refuge of organizational privacy available to the U. S. Government.

Classification is used, not to protect the national interest but to prevent national embarrassment.

There are security risks not only from information falling into the wrong hands, but also from information failing to find its way into the right hands. The government’s current approach to protecting classified information does not recognize this risk from failing to share

As much as possible, you simply don't give out information to the public, that is the first principle.

In the Eisenhower days, for example, the "Top Secret" stamp was used very, very freely in order not to conceal information from the Soviets or from potential enemies, but simply to conceal it from the U.S. people and from the press. This is done again and again.

We live in the most wide open society the world has ever known….We need to have fewer secrets and a rational classification policy.

We’re reaching a point where we have over classification. Every single administration, Republican and Democrat, has classified too much stuff. And now it’s getting out of control.

Congress leaks. That’s a fact of life.

I do not want to respond to leaks that concern things that have to do with state secrets of the first degree.

I don't see anything that's come out on WikiLeaks that was a legitimate secret.

Where protection of certain sensitive information is well-founded, I remain committed to upholding the laws and longstanding policies governing classification and public release.

I don't welcome leaks. There's a reason why these programs are classified.

I've spent a lot of time working on declassified documents - and they do get declassified after decades - you look at the record of declassified documents, and they are mostly concerned with keeping what the government does secret from its own population. It's mostly defense of the power system from its own population. Very little is authentic security.

WikiLeaks is what happens when the entire U.S. government is forced to go through a full-body scanner.

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.

I am shocked by the easy attitude of many in the media towards disclosing our Nation's secrets.

But the Congress has made the determination that certain kinds of information can be protected even though the American people may want to have access to information.