Transparency Issues Quotes

The very word Secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society.

Most of what is done I think is to kept secret so the public won't know. The same is true of what Wikileaks exposed.

Why does the White House sometimes seem so determined to close the door on the people's right to know what their government is doing?

GAO studies often put the lie to these lobbying vehicles.

The difficulty that WikiLeaks has, of course, is that we can't go around speculating on who our sources are. That would be irresponsible.

People used to be unhappy that files and data of Aramco are undeclared, unclear, and not transparent.

The book that I wrote is called Dark Money, and it's about secret spending that is very hard to follow. [George] Soros's whole thing is about government transparency, so he spends very much in the open, and the same with [Tom] Steyer.

I didn’t e-mail during my Presidency because I was afraid of the Freedom of Information Requests.

I have never been reimbursed at the federal level. Never want to be in a million years. To me, it's just not worth the red flag.

I call it the Rule of Three. If you read a company's financial statements three times, and you still can't figure out how they make their money, that's usually for a reason.

The difference between a leadership and a command company can be very great indeed, because in a hierarchical situation, people who have concerns about reactions against themselves would simply not put forward negative information.

Everything the CIA does is secret and it is secret particularly from the Congress.

We could have done things in a more transparent manner and explained better.

The American people have been denied important information for their own protection.

One of the saddest and most damaging legacies of the [George W.] Bush administration is the increased assertion of the "state secrets" privilege, which kept organizations like the ACLU - which had cases of people who had actually been tortured and held in indefinite detention - from getting their day in court.

Governments and local administrative bodies decide to inform the public of their mistakes only when losses have become disproportionately great.

Diplomacy is, perhaps, one element of the U.S. government that should not be subject to the demands of 'open government'; whenever it works, it is usually because it is done behind closed doors. But this may be increasingly hard to achieve in the age of Twittering bureaucrats.

Secrecy now beclouds everything about the Central Intelligence Agency—its cost, its efficiency, its success, its failures.

Even when the nation's leaders acknowledge tech issues, details are lacking.

I far more trust the press than I do the Administration with judgment of what should be secret and what shouldn’t. How many scandals has the Administration uncovered on its own?

I regret the Pro Fit investment because I didn't know that I was dealing with people who were more concerned about the exposure than fixing their business.

The United States is not nearly so concerned that its acts be kept secret from its intended victims as it is that the American people not know of them.

Excessive administration secrecy... feeds conspiracy theories and reduces the public's confidence in government.

There is no excuse for this administration shielding information about Iraq and the fact that we have great difficulties there from the American people.

The government's instinct is to shroud itself in secrecy - to act like the office of a president instead of as a collective cabinet government held to account by the elected House of Commons.