John Poindexter Quotes

#1. People don't like him (John Poindexter) for the same reason they don't like me ... If you get things done in this bureaucracy you step on toes.

Oliver North

#2. Do not take revenge in the heat of the moment.

Neil Gaiman

#3. You accept failure as a possible outcome of some of the experiments. If you don't get failures, you're not pushing hard enough on the objectives.

John Poindexter

#4. TIA was being used by real users, working on real data - foreign data. Data where privacy is not an issue.

John Poindexter

#5. I get up and retire when I wish. I go out if I wish and I do not go out if I do not desire to do so, except for the two days on which I give lectures.

Pierre Bayle

#6. Uncontrolled access to data, with no audit trail of activity and no oversight would be going too far. This applies to both commercial and government use of data about people.

John Poindexter

#7. We wanted to be as expansive as possible to make sure we didn't preclude some good ideas.

John Poindexter

#8. I think it is very difficult today to have a reasoned public discourse on any controversial subject. Certainly, election years present a complicating factor.

John Poindexter

#9. The problem we were struggling with within the closed market was what the incentive would be. You probably wouldn't use dollars. But those are all questions that need to be explored.

John Poindexter

#10. I think if I had to do it over again, I'd do it the same way. I would just put more resources into getting the public diplomacy part much stronger than we were able to.

John Poindexter

#11. Canada has given us John Candy and Martin Short and Bill Shatner and Lord knows how many other wonderful performers.

Jamie Farr

#12. Tie my heart in Egyptian threads.

Jennifer Calvert

#13. The discounting presumably is to be done for each period of time at that rate of interest which represents the alternative cost of employing capital in the occupation in question; that is, at the rate which the entrepreneur could obtain in other investments

Kenneth E. Boulding

#14. I really believe that we don't have to make a trade-off between security and privacy. I think technology gives us the ability to have both.

John Poindexter

#15. One of the reasons I continue to speak out is that the solutions to the counterterrorism problem involve other parts of the national security community - especially other elements of the Department of Defense, State, FBI, Homeland Security and the staff.

John Poindexter

#16. Nobody - myself included - believes that we could ever achieve total information awareness. But the government needs to set goals and long-range objectives. Total information awareness is a good goal.

John Poindexter

#17. What have we done to each other?

Jennifer Echols

#18. I knew from the beginning that privacy was going to be a huge issue, especially with regard to applying Total Information Awareness in counterterrorism. Because if the technology development was successful, a logical place to apply it was inside the United States.

John Poindexter

#19. I would counsel her to maintain the pregnancy on the grounds that the developing baby within her is a co-victim
of the rapist's heinous crime. To kill the fetus, who is innocent of the offense, is to add insult to injury.

R.C. Sproul

#20. Baseball is a rookie, his experience no bigger than the lump in his throat as he begins fulfillment of his dream.

Ernie Harwell

#21. It would be ideal if we could have an uncontrolled flow of information. But we realized you can't do that.

John Poindexter

#22. I do think it is very important that the religious communities do try to bring their teachings and their insights to bear on the stem cell debate and on the debate about genetic engineering.

Michael Sandel

#23. Teaching is performance art.

Kate Clinton