Our foreign intelligence was little more than what a military attache could learn at dinner.
The only soldier ever so honored
Not all intelligence can be artificial now, so if we make a mistake, the consequences are no longer simply located within an institution or a national culture.
The resistance of policy-makers to intelligence is not just founded on an ideological presupposition. They distrust intelligence sources and intelligence officials because they don't understand what the real problems are.
Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart.
You'll remember Dr. Rice said that several times: It was not a warning about the place and the method and the time - it was a general warning. And that points out the imperfection, if you would, of our intelligence.
One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.
There is no such thing as transparent intelligence.
As far as Paris goes, we don't know for sure yet how these guys communicate among themselves and how they communicated back to the ISIS leadership in Iraq and Syria, but I'm fairly confident we're going to learn they used these encrypted communication applications that have commercial encryption and are extremely difficult for companies to break - and which the companies have made the decision not to produce a key for.
If we want the best judgment of our intelligence personnel, we have to accept the fact that they will be wrong sometimes.
Anybody who is smart enough to be great, will be smart enough not to be President
The only situation a commander can know fully is his own: his opponent's he can know only from unreliable intelligence.
If intelligence is our only edge, we must learn to use it better, to shape it, to understand its limitations and deficiencies -- to use it as cats use stealth, as katydids use camouflage -- to make it the tool of our survival.
Emotion is often what we rely upon to carry us across the unfathomable voids in our intelligence.
You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.
The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.
With terrorist groups like al Qaeda, you can't learn what you want to learn about their capabilities and their future plans by taking a picture of it, and they've learned not to use the telephone.
Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence.
Spies are great, and when you need 'em, you need 'em. But they are no substitute for insight.
If I could have been a marine biologist I would have, but I didn't have that kind of intelligence. Numbers were never my strong point.
