Quotes About Intelligence

I feel dumber every time I listen to Sean Hannity. I don't want to be that guy.

I saw Cruyff at 36 and the way he played was interesting because he was so quick to understand situations. Football can still be very nice at that age because even though you are not as strong or as quick, you can still see things that others see two seconds later.

Secrecy is the first essential in affairs of the State.

I value my ability to keep state secrets.

We owe our big brains less to inventiveness than to conflicts of interest among social minds engaged in an arms race to be the best at manipulating others.

How clever am I? I'm really quite clever. I mean, look, I've got a first-class degree from Oxford.

There is no worse place for an intelligence service like CIA to be than on Page 1, above the fold in your daily newspaper.

My head works a little faster than people around me sometimes and it can be quite painful. It was a problem for me in school because I couldn't sit down long enough. I couldn't concentrate. So I didn't go to classes very much.

I disagree that an athlete can't be intelligent. Some people think that, in basketball, we have a bunch of masculine adults who don't know how to control themselves. They're feeble-minded and can't engage or articulate ideas. That's a narrative they keep trying to paint.

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

Rather than thinking of ourselves as a computer, and trying to give you computer-like functionality, it's better to start from the understanding that this is a pair of glasses, and say, 'How smart can we make these glasses for you?'

The $52.6 billion U.S. intelligence arsenal is aimed mainly at unambiguous adversaries, including al-Qaida, North Korea and Iran. But top-secret budget documents reveal an equally intense focus on one purported ally: Pakistan.

Attempts are being made to turn Pakistan into a security state. If they succeed they should better rename it 'ISIstan.'

When asked if I miss being in government, I usually try to lighten the moment by responding that I awake most days, read the paper, and then observe that, 'It's yet another great day to be the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.'

Yes, we have prototyped cars that can drive by themselves, but without smart vision, they cannot really tell the difference between a crumpled paper bag on the road, which can be run over, and a rock that size, which should be avoided.

It's paradoxical that things that are hard for people are easy for the computer, and things that are hard for the computer, any child can understand.

We're not trying to harass the average American. We need to convert this now to a risk-based system, with TSA concentrating and focusing on intelligence, on security, setting up again the parameters of which we do this.

George W Bush is like a bad comic working the crowd, a moron, if you'll pardon the expression.

An intellectual is a man who doesn't know how to park a bike.

Working on 'Parks' was like heaven because everyone there was just intimidatingly intelligent and funny, and we would have these hilarious debates about really tangential things. It was inspiring because I felt really challenged to be my best.

It is not easy for the courts to control the intelligence agencies. There has to be concerted and coordinated effort on part of the courts, the parliament, and the government.

I was particularly good at math and science.

CIA relies on a partner's focus, linguistic agility, and cultural depth; in return, the partner benefits from CIA's resources, technology, and global view.

We've done it in intelligence sharing and certain elements of security. There were parts of the department, in fact, that worked very well in Katrina, like the Coast Guard and TSA.