Christopher A. Wray Quotes

I used to have a little saying I used when people said, 'What are your priorities?' I'd give them a bit of government alphabet soup. I'd say 'CTCPROW: Counterterrorism, counterproliferation, rest of the world.'

Looking back over my more than a half century in intelligence, I have not experienced a time when we've been beset by more crises and threats around the globe.

People ask me all the time, 'What keeps you up at night?' And I say, 'Spicy Mexican food, weapons of mass destruction, and cyber attacks.'

This experience actually means the very opposite: the largest military power was unable to stop such a sensitive attack and will be unable to rule out such a possibility in the future. Precisely this is the background to the United States' military interventions.

To preserve our security in a dangerous century, vigilance is not enough. National Intelligence must do more.

The military has to think in terms of worst case scenarios. In a sense, they have to play the pessimist.

Armchair generals assume that nations decide on their foreign policy objectives and then subordinate everything else to achieving them. Life is more complicated. Threats, opportunities and risks are always uncertain, but the economic costs of maximum preparedness are definite.

The United States in 2001 is faced with a growing, almost dizzying disparity between its diminished capabilities and the burgeoning requirements of national security.

Are there topics of sufficient import to the nation's well-being to replace the Soviets as the focus of U.S. intelligence?

We're not yet in a multipolar world. We are in a chaotic world.... We live in a world where the dangers are real for all of us.

Our nation counts on us to have the expertise and the insight to flag the risks and the opportunities that lie ahead, and to keep our eye on all the critical international concerns that face our nation right now.

CIA will continue to pursue every lead; analyze the information we collect with critical, objective eyes; and brief reliable intelligence to protect U.S. forces deployed around the world.

People often ask CIA Directors what keeps them up at night. Between rogue WMD programs, cyber threats, terrorist organizations, great power rivalries, and other global threats, there's bound to be more than a single reason I'm losing sleep on any given night.

We know our future's not guaranteed, so every day, we have to relentlessly pursue additional actions to drive our competitiveness.

Tomorrow always arrives. It is always different. And even the mightiest company is in trouble if it has not worked on the future. Being surprised by what happens is a risk that even the largest and richest company cannot afford, and even the smallest business need not run.

He who fails to plan is planning to fail.

America is facing some major threats. Cyber warfare, Islamic terror and Russia, does it sound terrible? It sounds like the end of the world.

We disbanded our intelligence and then found we needed it. Let's not go through that again. Redirect it, reduce the amount of money spent, but let's not destroy it. Because you don't know 10 years out what you're going to face.

To anticipate and prevent disasterous contingencies would be the part of wisdom and patriotism.

There's no substitute for taking a clear-eyed look at the threats we'll face and asking how our force will adapt to meet those threats.

National security is not just things that go boom. It is not just terrorists and foreign adversaries.

Rogue states are the main threat to peace and freedom, and they require a strong, comprehensive policy response - a policy that I call 'rogue state rollback,' in which our goal is not simply to contain rogue regimes, but to drive them from power.

When times are bad is when you want to build! Why wait for things to pick up so everything will cost more?

It is better to anticipate than to react.

We're facing a very different sort of threat now, a more amorphous threat, al Qaeda, terrorism, and so on. And so the military has abandoned the two-war strategy.