David Brooks Quotes

There'll be differences of opinion in just about every intelligence analysis that you make.

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

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

And I argued with that intelligence estimate and I think it is a responsibility of policymakers to use their best judgment on the basis of the intelligence they've received.

I was an intelligence officer, not a policy-maker.

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

I suddenly realized at the CIA that I had to make life-and-death decisions about people.

This open eye for possible alternatives which need to be scrutinized before we can determine which is the best grounded is profoundly disconcerting to all conservatives and to almost all revolutionaries.

The intelligence community is intended to base its intelligence estimates on facts and analysis—not philosophy and conviction.

But what if our intelligence is wrong?

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

If we want the best judgment of our intelligence personnel, we have to accept the fact that they will be wrong sometimes.

The current attitude is pretty much the attitude we had in the CIA during the 1950s. When we analysed the operational climate and all the political forces in any given country, we had our friends and we had our enemies. There was no one in between. The friends were centre and Right wing social democrats, conservatives, liberals, in some cases all the way over to neo-fascists. The enemies were Left wing social democrats, socialists, Communists, all the way to those advocating armed struggle.

The CIA’s intelligence was in many cases simply Bill Casey’s ideology.

The manner in which intelligence indicators were handled in the Cuba situation may well be the most serious flaw in our intelligence system, and one which, if uncorrected, could lead to the gravest consequences

The operational tail will wag the intelligence dog. The top people will be forced to take up all their time in the direction of operations and will neglect intelligence.

Either Al Qaeda is a threat worth acting against or it is not. CIA leadership has to decide which it is and cease these bi-polar mood swings.

Intelligence is often viewed as a profession that steals secrets and then knits those secrets together for policymakers in order to inform their judgments.

It doesn't matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.

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.

We seem to have trouble with [critical thinking]. And our political system doesn't help.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.

Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskoph had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times.

It is a fatal fault to reason whilst observing, though so necessary beforehand and so useful afterwards.

They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)