State Secrecy Quotes

The Secretary of State exists only to recognize the existence of a world which Congress would rather ignore ... Since the first day the Senate existed, it has always intrigued against the Secretary of State ...

The president and the executive branch are always going to have greater latitude and greater authority when it comes to protecting America because sometimes you just have to respond quickly and not everything that is a danger can be publicized and be subject to open debate, but there have to be some guardrails.

I ordered that they use any means necessary, including illegal means, to accomplish this goal. . . . The president of the United States can never admit that.

Snowden is not the disease. We don't have traitors or whistleblowers blooming all over because they are some sort of malady. The disease is war. We've been at war now and with no end in sight for over a dozen years, the longest in our history. War breeds tyranny. War breeds people who want to prosecute and persecute those who reveal that tyranny. So what we have is the government becoming more draconian - clearly understandable. It always does in a period of war. And as it becomes more draconian, more and more whistleblowers coming.

We shouldn't send CIA spooks to overthrow governments.

Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy, and they have to be - protect themselves. That's why you have state secret laws. Citizens are not supposed to know what their government is doing to them.

The Chinese people have been forced to forget the Tiananmen massacre. There has been no public debate about the event, no official apology. The media aren't allowed to mention it. Still today people are being persecuted and imprisoned for disseminating information about it.

Truth telling is not compatible with the defence of the realm.

How did we come to this: a Kafkaesque world where information that is in the public domain can be retroactively declared secret.

A threat to national security which has to be silenced

It is like we are obliged to assume that the government is only doing what it says it is doing.

Most governments lie to each other. That's the way business gets done.

I can honestly say I've never sold any arms to a repressive foreign regime while reassuring everyone at home that the weapons will be used for nice things.

I've yet to meet a President who controlled the CIA.

It’s inherent in [the] government’s right, if necessary, to lie to save itself when it’s going up into a nuclear war. This seems to me basic.

The government of the German Democratic Republic rejects secret policies. It works for the people, and only the people, so it does not need to keep secrets like the warmongers.

It's inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government.

I've always been baffled by critics of the CIA, who are horrified that it does illegal things. That is the purpose of an intelligence service: to perform illegal acts.

The way the United States intelligence community operates is it doesn't limit itself to the protection of the homeland. It doesn't limit itself to countering terrorist threats, countering nuclear proliferation. It's also used for economic espionage, for political spying to gain some knowledge of what other countries are doing.

Back channels themselves are as old as American diplomacy. Thomas Jefferson was an early enthusiast - he often routed around his secretary of state, once sending a secret letter to the American envoy in France, Robert Livingston, that contained a coded message.

Wars are precipitated by motives which the statesmen responsible for them dare not publicly avow.

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.

Freedom of the press is not questioned when investigative journalism unearths scandals, But that does not mean that every classified state document should be made available to journalists.

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

It is important to note that Edward Snowden was labeled as a spy not a whistle-blower - even though he exposed the reach of the spy services into the lives of most Americans. More importantly, he was denounced as being part of a generation that unfortunately combined being educated with a distrust of authority.