Janet McTeer Quotes

It is not a secret if it is known by three people.

This gentleman feels that all the members of Congress should have access to all the information which is in the hands of officials in the executive branch who deal with foreign affairs. He states that this is so in England and France. I think the gentleman must be mistaken, for it would be "agin" human nature for so many people to know a secret and keep it! Much of the information which comes to officials dealing with foreign affairs is uncorroborated, but valuable as background material. The sources of this information would soon dry up if it became the property of too many people. It seems to me that in foreign affairs, as in all matters of government, one must deal with reality, recognize human nature as it is and set up machinery to deal with real situations, not those which we wish existed.

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.

There is very seldom any true secret.

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.

It is up to the government to keep the government's secrets.

I have no secrets; all of these things have been discussed at length in guitar magazines over the years but are far too elaborate to cover in one article.

I am shocked by the easy attitude of many in the media towards disclosing our Nation's secrets.

The most secretive White House in modern history has learned the hard way …that it must reveal a pretty steady stream of secrets.

The truth won't stay hidden and will come out.

Now that you have the Xerox machine, you can't keep many secrets.

There’s no town in the world that has the leaks that come out of this town. [Washington, DC.]

Once exposed, a secret loses all its power.

Congress leaks. That’s a fact of life.

Under the classification rules observed by the Senate, we are not even allowed to tap out the truth in Morse code—and we tried just about everything else we could think of to warn the American people.

Usually the public is better off with more information than less. That includes information the government would like to keep quiet.

Most leaks from large bureaucracies are “good” leaks: no danger to national security, no harm to innocent people, information the public ought to know.

Some things simply cannot leak. And if they do leak, the government has to do something about it.

For a long time now, there has been too much secrecy in this city. This administration stands on the side not of those seek to withhold information but who seek to make it known.

There are some secrets you want to keep to yourself, even if they don't matter. They might only matter if you keep them secret.

The only way to keep your secrets safe is to have none at all.

The Foreign Office knows no secrets.

Don't have any more secrets than you can keep yourself.

Do people ever reflect, one wonders, that the best way to protect against the penetration of one's secrets by others is to have the minimum of secrets to conceal?

All confidence placed in another is dangerous if it is not perfect, for on almost all occasions we ought to tell everything or to conceal everything. We have already told too much of our secret, if one single circumstance is to be kept back.