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" A person seeking to be the President of the United States should not suggest violence in any way. "

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" I used to have a little saying I used when people said, 'What are your priorities?' I'd give them a bit of government alphabet soup. I'd say 'CTCPROW: Counterterrorism, counterproliferation, rest of the world.' "

" After the attacks on September 11th, we all learned lessons. "

" The use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It really did work. "

" When the intelligence is making a policymaker too happy, he ought to challenge it, and even if he doesn't, the intelligence briefer needs to launch a red team against his own conclusions to see if he can hold his ground. "

" Accusations fit on a bumper sticker; the truth takes longer. "

" When I was in government, what we would used to mystically call 'the kinetic option' was way down on our list. In my personal thinking - in my personal thinking, I need to emphasize that - I have begun to consider that that may not be the worst of all possible outcomes. "

" Americans are very practical folks. Accustomed to hard choices in their own lives, they are willing to give us in intelligence a lot of slack as we make the hard choices our profession demands. "

" In the Cold War, a lot of Soviet actions could be explained as extensions of Czarist imperial ambitions, but that didn't stop us from studying Marxism in theory and Communism in practice to better understand that adversary. "

" The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that said Iran had paused its nuclear weaponization work also reported with high confidence that such work had been going on through 2003. How far did they get? That's an important question, but I fear that the Iranians will never answer it, and we will not insist that they do. "

" Politicization - the shading of analysis to fit prevailing policy or politics - is the harshest criticism one can make of an intelligence organization. It strikes beyond questions of competence to the fundamental ethic of the enterprise, which is, or should be, truth telling. "

" It's hard to brief in the Oval. You know, you can't - no visual aids, hard to roll out something in front of somebody. "

" There is an unarguable downside to unbreakable encryption. "

" There's a bigger difference between the first and second Bush administrations than there is between Bush and Obama. That's really true. "

" My experience has been that military assessments on 'how goes the war' are consistently more optimistic than those made by the CIA and other agencies. "

" 'End strength' - the total number of government employees you can have at the end of the year. That's a separate exercise and requires independent energy, independent effort with the Congress to get the ceiling of your government employees raised. "

" People have a right to privacy, but they also have a right to live. Fundamentally, we need cybersecurity and need to secure communications as well. "

" A significant U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan has been continuous since October 2001, and President Obama's short-lived 'surge' in 2009 was a continuation of his predecessor's buildup there. "

" The problem with cyber weapons for a country like ours is the ability to control them. "

" I believe we do have a great intelligence service. Is it good enough in all circumstances? Of course not. We live in the human condition. We try to make it better each day. "

" Xi agreed to the American definition of legitimate espionage. In other words, you don't use the power of the state to steal secrets for profit. "

" Counterterrorism, counterproliferation, and counterintelligence are staples. The four countries of highest interest - Russia, China, Iran and North Korea - are constants. "

" President Obama came to office with a strong belief that America had overreached, that we had become too involved. It matched the national mood, and indeed, there was some evidence that it was true. "

" When I was at the CIA I asked my civilian advisory board to tackle some tough questions. Among the toughest: In a political culture that every day demands more transparency and more public accountability from every aspect of national life, could American intelligence continue to survive and succeed? That jury is still out. "

" My literal responsibility as director of the CIA with regard to covert action was to inform the Congress - not to seek their approval; to inform. "

" I enjoyed writing in school. I don't know that I was all that good at it in school. I worked at it later. I feel comfortable writing now. I enjoy writing now. I suspect, like most college students, I viewed writing then to be more tedious. "

" Once you're in a network, you can do a whole bunch of things to that network. It's just that NSA doesn't have the authority to do that. "

" In my heart of hearts, I don't think it's a good position to say that Guantanamo is not an acceptable answer for anyone we might capture now or in the future. "

" When I was director of the CIA, I knew that we had been - and I'm choosing my words very carefully here - effective in our expansion. We really had - expansion of government agencies and expansion of use of contractors. Effective, we were; efficient, we weren't. And so, as director of the CIA, I went after the inefficiencies part. "

" The point I wanted to make was, as we have moved forward on the war on terrorism, FISA has been increasingly effective in terms of results. "

" President Obama and his successors are dependent on the 100,000-plus people inside the American intelligence community - the people Edward Snowden betrayed. "