Ideological Motivation Quotes

We, the FBI, don't investigate ideology, no matter how repugnant. When it turns to violence, we're all over it.

Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.

Any time you're a poster child for the CIA, there are a lot of people that are - either have ideological or they are mentally unbalanced - that are going to try to find you and perhaps cause you harm.

We often speak of domestic terrorism and hate crimes in the same breath, and there is a fine line between the two, and certainly overlap in some cases.

It is true that jihadists are often middle class. But that’s because terrorist groups are like other employers: they accept the best candidates who apply.

In times of conflict, America tends to focus on personalities over ideas or movements, trying to play the man, not the board — as if capturing or killing Osama bin Laden, for example, would instantly end the present conflict. But such thinking loses sight of the fact that ideas have consequences. If one believes that God commands something, this belief is not likely to dissipate just because the person who elucidated it has been silenced. Islam, as a faith, is as essential a feature of the terrorist threat today as it was of the Barbary piracy over two centuries ago.

I think that a lot of terrorists have been middle class and, more surprisingly, many of them have been people who were not directly affected by the things they're angry about.

An intellectual may be interested in ideas and policies for their own sake, but a politician's interest is exclusively in the question of whether an idea's time has come.

We know what causes terrorism. Terrorists cause terrorism.

Fundamentally, terrorism is about public relations.

Today's terrorists are pursuing a distinct route. They are increasingly attacking civilians in symbolic targets, such as those of economic importance, or venues of bustling life like public transportation or entertainment, like nightclubs.

The Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013 remind us that the terrorist threat against the United States remains persistent. The threat from homegrown violent extremists is of particular concern. These individuals present unique challenges because they do not share a typical profile; their experiences and motives are often distinct and personal.

Most terrorists are people deeply concerned by what they see as social, political, or religious injustice and hypocrisy, and the immediate grounds for their terrorism is often retaliation for an action of the United States.

Since 9/11 we have somehow come to accept the 'radicalization' narrative, which basically holds that people become terrorists through a series of consecutive, traceable steps laid out for them by large international Islamic organizations. Reality is messier, and also smaller.

If George W. Bush had gone into Iraq for cynical reasons, we could cut our losses now. What's frightening is that he did it for ideological reasons, and therefore he's not going to get out. So it isn't ultimately about oil or about Israel, it's about a belief. I don't know whether God talks to him or whether he's trying to undo what his father did. But he believes in the mission. The body bags aren't going to deter him. Public dissent isn't going to deter him.

Revolutionaries are rarely motivated primarily by material considerations-though the illusion that they are persists in the West.

If you don't understand what al Qaeda was trying to do on 9/11, if you don't have a sense of who Osama bin Laden is as a person, if you don't have a sense of what al Qaeda, the organization, was on 9/11, 9/11 appears to be more or less inexplicable.

First of all, radical beliefs are not a predictor of terrorist behavior: most people who hold radical beliefs never become terrorists, and some terrorists don't hold radical beliefs.

Suicidal terrorists may have short shelf lives.

Politicization led to an intelligence output that obscured understanding of al Qaeda’s sources of strength and support.

The Iranians excel at identifying potential recruits for terrorist attacks, and then recruiting and training them.

It's much harder to detect a lone wolf than it is somebody who's associated with a larger organization who's having planning meetings and making phone calls to people in the organization. And so that is really how the jihad has really developed in the United States.

Cybercriminals are usually driven by profit, while cyberterrorists are driven by ideology.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev is telling no tales. The older of the two brothers who committed the Boston Marathon bombings was likely the one who planned the attack, but when he died in a shootout with police just days after the blasts, his thoughts and motivations vanished with him.

Islamic terrorism is the handiwork of people who’ve heeded, not hijacked, Islam.