Quotes from Valerie Plame

Joe and I are still very aware of the fact that we live in a country where he criticised the government and lived another day. That trumps all. To paraphrase Churchill, democracy is the worst form of government apart from all the other forms of government. You constantly have to fight for it; you have to keep your government honest.

Leaks are always bad news.

I would never jeopardize classified information. I served my country well and loyally, and I had to sue the C.I.A. on First Amendment grounds.

How lucky are we to have Naomi Watts and Sean Penn playing us? We've seen the final cut now a couple times, and the scenes with the marriage fraying at the edges are still very difficult to watch. However, our hope was that no matter your political persuasion, you're taken with the idea that it's important to hold power in check.

Certainly, if we had not invaded Iraq on intelligence that was clearly manipulated and cherry picked, we would be in a different position today.

In many, many parts of the world, being a female, you're really just wallpaper. If you take care to blend in, no one would think in a thousand years that you were doing anything suspicious.

Our critics would love nothing more for us to go away and just be quiet. And we won't give them that satisfaction. We have young children that, one day, when they understand more of what's happened and what's transpired, we wanna be able to say to them, you know, we did our best. And we told the truth.

Americans want to believe that we are a nation of laws, and no one is above them, including the president. Mr. Trump's and his associates' actions during his campaign and during his brief time in office are extremely troubling.

I have always been appalled by the depiction of female CIA operatives.

I think it's the height of patriotism to continue to exercise your right as a citizen and to hold your government to account. Isn't that what the very essence of democracy is about?

I think human intelligence is the only one that will actually tell you intent.

Of course the job has a lot of glamour. But it really is about being smarter than your average bear. Your mind is your best weapon. It's great when you're a good shot with an AK-47, but it's about being clever.

The human and environmental devastation caused by nuclear weapons - whether by testing, mistake or malice - is the very reason we need to eliminate them altogether.

I really believe the nexus of terrorism and nuclear weapons is the world's most ominous threat.

The truth is, as long as nuclear weapons exist, we are not safe.

Our mission was to make sure that the bad guys, basically, did not get nuclear weapons.

There's no way you can possibly intellectually justify, 'Well, it's okay for the Western Judeo-Christian countries to have nuclear weapons, but not for a country like Iran.' That logic goes nowhere fast.

There is definitely a sense that when you, as a CIA ops officer... are handling assets, they are delivering to you their trust and their well-being. And you feel very protective of them, even if they're not very nice people.

I can tell you, all the intelligence services in the world were running my name through their databases to see did anyone by this name come in the country? When? Do we know anything about it? Where did she stay? Who did she see?

There's a huge impact on national security and intelligence. The new normal is going to be more and more of these hacks, whether it's Target or Home Depot or the Office of Personnel Management or Jennifer Lawrence's nude photos.

The entire intelligence community is so bloated and so reliant on contractors. There's no question there's many tasks that make sense to outsource, and yet, we have followed blindly this dogma that if it's private contracting, it must be better.

I go to my kids' sports games and don't have to carry the enormous burden of secrecy with me every day. However, adrenaline still courses through my body whenever I go through passport control to another country.

I am angry when I hear things like Cheney whispering into Bush's ear on the way to Obama's inauguration to ask him to pardon 'Scooter' Libby and not to 'leave a soldier on the battlefield'. What kind of metaphor is that for his petty partisan views, when you have men and women giving the ultimate sacrifice? I have nothing but contempt.

I believe in much more diplomacy, not less.