Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

I think all governments engage in intelligence gathering vis-a-vis other governments.

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

Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn't feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone.

…historically, the official personnel of the Soviet bloc countries assigned to this nation, including those at the United Nations, have been used extensively for espionage purposes…

The safety and security of the nation depends more so than ever before on intelligence.

We don’t have to choose between preserving privacy and preventing terrorism. We do have to decide how much oversight and accountability there should be when the government conducts surveillance on its citizens.

The public must know about the general outlines of surveillance activities in order to evaluate whether the government is achieving the appropriate balance between privacy and security.

I want to make it clear … that America is not interested in spying on ordinary citizens.

CIA will not develop operations to penetrate another Government agency, even with the approval of its leadership.

… the government should not be permitted to collect and store mass, undigested, non-public personal information.

We want our spying agencies spying on foreigners. That’s why we have them.

I served 10 years on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, and I had the distinct privilege of meeting with real U.S. spies throughout the globe.

In the Chinese view, the United States has designed its own system of rules about what constitutes 'legal' spying and what is illegal.

No one would argue that it's in the United States' interest to have independent knowledge of the plans and intentions of foreign countries. But we need to think about where to draw the line on these kind of operations so we're not always attacking our allies, the people we trust, the people we need to rely on, and to have them in turn rely on us.

Europeans don't like to talk about intelligence, and they often pretend their countries don't spy.

On the question of information security, he claims that, in a Trump Administration, the U.S. government will not spy on its own citizens. If true, this would represent a turn away from the strong language that he has used about identifying terrorists on our soil.

I know firsthand from my experience working counterintelligence investigations for the FBI that kicking a diplomat out of the country is no small thing.

There is a huge difference between gathering intelligence in foreign countries, even our allies, and secretly getting information on U.S. citizens.

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.

In terms of the espionage, this is something I have talked to President Obama about. We don't want it to mar the relationship between Mexico and the United States. But it is unacceptable for a country to practice such espionage, especially if there is a good relationship with the other country.

You can't get closer to the heart of national sovereignty than national security and intelligence services.

I suspect Obama did not know he was recording Angela Merkel's cell phones.

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

In intelligence work, there are limits to the amount of information one can share. Confidentiality is essential.

No one's interested really in knowing what policies or diplomatic initiatives or arms negotiations might have been compromised by me.