Modern Terrorism Quotes

The terrorists of today are not wild-eyed, illiterate fanatics who merely obey the orders of their evil leaders. They are educated, well-off, normal people with wives and families to love and look after. We cannot know they are terrorists until they have committed their horrible crimes.

This is an unprecedented pace of terror in modern times. And so, to say they're on the run absolutely defies reality.

Modern terrorism is too destructive to be tolerated, much less supported.

Your parents' al Qaeda was a very different model than the threat we face today.

We're facing a very different sort of threat now, a more amorphous threat, al Qaeda, terrorism, and so on. And so the military has abandoned the two-war strategy.

The laws for the control of terrorists were framed at a time when the terrorists did not have the technology available to them today…. There is a case for re-examining those laws.

In just 20 years terrorism, communications, the jet plane and the increase of wealth and knowledge have forced, to varying degrees, world leaders into a haunted and secret peerage whose links with the people they guide are meticulously cleansed and staged.

The threat is real, and it comes from the Internet. This is a new generation of terrorist. This is not Bin Laden in caves with couriers anymore. This is what the new threat of terrorism looks like.

Today, we have a powerful military that serves as a deterrent, but the enemy we have today is not like World War II, where you sign a piece of paper and the war is over. Today they're not in uniform. In my time we knew what the enemy looked like, we knew his weapons systems and such. Today, your cab driver may be the person, you have no idea. I don't know how we got into this fix, but we're there.

That's what really concerns me about the modern-day terrorists that we face is this global expansion.

When the new wave of terrorism came on the modern world, which is the late 1960s, early 1970s, I think we spent about a decade, the United States and our allies, trying to figure out how to deal with it.

Today's terrorists do not share a particular ethnic, educational or socioeconomic background.

Part of this new world of completely improvisational terrorism is that there were codes of war that disintegrated in the face of terrorism.

Social media serve as the propaganda machine of 21st century terror, and this is apparent in the Middle East.

The problem is everybody is worrying about explosive vests and people with AK-47s. We live in a day and age when someone sitting in Somalia or in Chile or in Perth, Australia, can be sitting there with a laptop and can theoretically take down one of our power grids or part of our infrastructure and do infinitely more damage. Nobody talks about that. It's not a question of who comes into the United States. We're way past that.