Political Intelligence Quotes

Our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union.

Of course a lot of the journalists hated Nixon, but they were always blown away by how smart he was.

The Republicans are many things, but they're not dumb.

It’s worth remembering that America has the toughest system of intelligence supervision in the world—way tougher than France, tougher than Germany. No one else has this combination of a court with judges who are not appointed by the government, who are appointed by the Supreme Court. You have congressional scrutiny—and it may well be that Congress is in different hands from the party that holds the White House—plus you have executive power in the White House. And then you have a very strong professional code within the NSA. What we have seen from the Nixon experience was this: when Nixon tried to politicise the CIA, trying to overrule it, trying to politicise the FBI, it ended in disaster. And I think that although the American record over the last 50 years certainly has some black spots, I would far rather live under the American system of intelligence oversight than I would under the French. So I think we should all learn from the American system and try and copy it.

Eisenhower was less deferential to the military than he seemed likely to be, Kennedy was not at all beholden to the pope, George W. Bush was smarter than portrayed and Barack Obama has not led a charge from the left - least of all on behalf of the civil liberties that have eroded since September 11, 2001.

Well, he can't be dumb, I mean, because he's been president for four years and he's president again, so you're going to get caught out if you're really bad, aren't you? Unless millions and millions of Americans are dumb.

Transparency has long been a rare commodity in international affairs. But today, the forces of technology are ushering in a new age of openness that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. Governments, journalists, and nongovernmental organ­izations (NGOs) can now harness a flood of open-source information, drawn from commercial surveillance satellites, drones, smartphones, and computers, to reveal hidden activities in contested areas—from Ukraine to Syria to the South China Sea.

A great deal of world politics is a fundamental struggle, but it is also a struggle that has to be waged intelligently.

Questions of motive are very difficult in intelligence analysis.

We have a lot of politicians who have really small brains and really big hearts.

No American witnessing the way that President George W. Bush and his generals have bungled the Iraq war can deny that our leaders, civilian and military alike, will have to get a lot smarter if the U.S. armed services are to persuade the Islamic world to embrace the blessings of democracy.

When I heard Jeb was running, I first thought, 'Wow, I'm not sure I could go through another campaign,' but Jeb is so smart.

The remarkable failure in our time of political and military prediction. It is curious to reflect that out of al the ‘experts’ of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939

Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.

I've got five years of experience as a national security staffer in the U.S. Congress.

I don't intend to simply go away and write my plays and be a good boy. I intend to remain an independent and political intelligence in my own right.

We tend to think of politicians as time-servers and slackers. But on those committees they usually have an interest in the subject. And they're quite clever. I've seen them pick people apart.

There's no smarter politician out there than Bill Clinton.

Over the next decade, the market-driven explosion of surveillance sensors and data analytics will bring an unprecedented level of transparency to global affairs. Commercial satellites will capture daily images of the entire globe, offering inexpensive and automated reports on everything from crop yields to military activity. Journalists, NGOs, and bloggers will increasingly use crowdsourced data to uncover wartime atrocities and expose government hypocrisy. Private security companies will discover the sources of cyberattacks and data theft. Biometric systems will expose the identities of clandestine operatives, and government agencies will struggle to contain leakers and whistleblowers.

Hillary Clinton's not very bright. Everybody says she's so smart, so much smarter than Donald Trump. She doesn't really have a grasp. She doesn't have a grasp on what's important and what's not.

What's happened is the Republicans have been smart.

I am not satisfied with the quality of our political intelligence.

The smartest person in the United States Senate, and he knows it, is John Sununu. Thank God he had his mother's temperament.

Americans, unlike their elected politicians, are not stupid.

The intelligent and efficient politician is a species virtually unknown in the galaxy. Perhaps I might secure a scraping [for my] cell library.