National Security Day Quotes

#1. There are a whole variety of reasons I want to be attorney general, a whole variety of things that I do as attorney general that go beyond national security.

Eric Holder

#2. Any military force should be dictated by the vital national security interests of the United States. And if and when we use force, we should use overwhelming force for a clearly stated objective. And then when we're done, we should get the heck out.

Ted Cruz

#3. I believe that we need to set conditions to close the detention facility at Guantanamo. This includes retaining the option to transfer detainees from this facility elsewhere ... It is in the U.S.'s national security interest to do so.

Pete Visclosky

#4. Defeating Barack Obama becomes, in fact, a duty of national security. Because the fact is, he is incapable of defending the United States.

Newt Gingrich

#5. First, we must continually reaffirm the principle that the security of the United States is not, and should never be, a partisan matter. The United States can best defend its national security interests abroad by uniting behind a bipartisan security policy at home.

William Cohen

#6. Early childhood education is an urgent educational, economic and moral imperative. Without it, we face a long-term national economic security crisis.

J. B. Pritzker

#7. Talk about threats to national security
how about government so big, so complicated and so unmanageable, it cant get out of its own way?

Bob Schieffer

#8. From protecting our natural resources to providing maritime security and national defense, the Coast Guard's duties are broad in scope, and the performance of those duties has never been more important.

Russ Carnahan

#9. Whenever we have had a need for a national security or public safety issue, Congress has always followed the recommendations of the White House, regardless of who is in control, giving them the resources to keep America safe and to enforce our laws.

Jim Sensenbrenner

#10. If the national security is involved, anything goes. There are no rules. There are people so lacking in roots about what is properand what is improper that they don't know there's anything wrong in breaking into the headquarters of the opposition party.

Helen Gahagan Douglas

#11. A big part of the story is American imperialism, and the flip side of that is the building up of the national security state here at home.

Peter Kuznick

#12. We will stop the terrorist attacks before they occur because we will not be prisoners to political correctness. Rather, we will speak the truth. Border security is national security and we will not be admitting jihadists as refugees.

Ted Cruz

#13. Today more than ever, the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, technology, finance, national security and ecology are disappearing. You often cannot explain one without referring to the others, and you cannot explain the whole without reference to them all.

Thomas L. Friedman

#14. Our National Guard, as I think everybody knows, has provided about 40 percent of the boots on the ground in Iraq and in the conflict against Islamofascism. They went into that battle, being called up for their national security service, short of equipment.

Kit Bond

#15. The president doesn't order the military to seize political opponents. He doesn't order his intelligence community to lie about national security for political purposes. He uses the military or intelligence communities to protect the United States and our citizens, not to help him win elections.

Kathleen Troia McFarland

#16. I would urge that we all use a little bit of caution in dealing with an issue that is so vital to our national security.

Theodore Stevens

#17. The visa lottery system poses a national security threat. Under the program, each successful applicant is chosen at random and given the status of permanent resident based on pure luck.

Bob Goodlatte

#18. Obama's respect for the Constitution does not apply to protections against unreasonable search and seizure, as Obama's deeply intrusive National Security Agency programs prove.

Ben Shapiro

#19. I can remember when I was National Security Adviser, the intelligence community told us ... they put out an intelligence report saying that Iran would never back off from attacks on shipping in the Gulf if we use force.

Frank Carlucci

#20. Energy has become a national security issue and as technology continues to improve, there will be more debates like the one on Keystone.

Ed Royce

#21. Superstition, then and now, is not just a threat to the truth. It's also a threat to national security.

Steven Johnson

#22. I believe with all my heart that our first priority must be world peace, and that use of force is always and only a last resort, when everything else has failed, and then only with regard to our national security.

Ronald Reagan

#23. I've forgotten more about national security than George W. Bush will ever learn.

Wesley Clark

#24. President Bush even authorized the National Security Agency to monitor -
without preclearance from a judge - phone calls
and e-mails of U.S. citizens. In

Todd Donovan

#25. We need to stop spending money on those weapons systems that do not advance national security.

Lawrence Korb

#26. In America, you have the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. You've got drones now being considered for domestic surveillance. You have the National Security Agency building the world's giantest spy center.

Heather Brooke

#27. The time has passed in America when this party can be the party of compassion and let the executive branch run foreign policy. It won't work. We have to be the party that can stand toe to toe with George W. Bush on national security, as well as the party of compassion.

Wesley Clark

#28. Laura Bush is the same way. I mean, they both, um, understand, they understand the challenges of the moment and understand the responsibilities, he understands the responsibilities he has to protect the national security of America as well as the economic security of America.

Donald Evans

#29. During the election campaign of 2000, it was generally thought that then-governor Bush didn't know much about foreign policy or national security affairs, and that Colin Powell would lead on that front, while the president's main concern would be domestic.

Elliott Abrams

#30. By 1967, J. Edgar Hoover had concluded that the Black Panther Party had replaced the Communist Party as the gravest threat to national security.

Alexander Cockburn

#31. One final bit of advice. The next time a senior administrator of the CIA tells you she has a national-security crisis ... Leave the bullshit in Cambridge.

Dan Brown

#32. Torture gives you reliable and unreliable information. That's the reason why most people in the world don't do it. So this idea that you have to torture people in order to protect national security is a false argument, and I reject it.

John McCain

#33. [T]he harm [Clinton AG] Reno did to American national security in the fight against terror was incalculable.

Dick Morris

#34. A huge national security state has developed in the United States since World War II. Its function is to buttress anticommunist, procapitalist governments and undermine and destroy popular movements whenever possible.

Michael Parenti

#35. Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous.

William Proxmire

#36. It seems that 'national security' is the root password to the Constitution. As with any dishonest superuser, the best countermeasure is strong encryption.

Phil Karn

#37. That whole idea of threats to national security is a very interesting one. The phrase is very useful for the government to try to encompass the citizenry in the same box as the government is in. To say, "We're all in this together. It threatens all of us."

Howard Zinn

#38. I would say national security is work in progress.

Jeb Bush

#39. In the 2000 election, George W. Bush, who had shirked military service, succeeded in presenting himself as more reliable on national security than Al Gore.

Samantha Power

#40. USA Freedom Actdid, however, take away a valuable tool that allowed the National Security Agency and other law - and other intelligence agencies to quickly and rapidly access phone records and match them up with other phone records to see who terrorists have been calling.

Marco Rubio

#41. The lesson for me was clear: national security officials do not like the light. They act abusively and thuggishly only when they believe they are safe, in the dark. Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, we discovered, its enabling force. Transparency is the only real antidote.

Glenn Greenwald

#42. You know, there's a real irony in U.S. assistance programs. First of all, I think it's misnamed. We're not so much trying to help people as we're trying to help ourselves. So let's be clear about this. So these are - in my view, they're cold calculations of national security and not aid programs.

Richard Armitage

#43. Nixon did not anticipate the extent to which Kissinger, whom he barely knew when he appointed him national-security adviser in 1969, would be envious and high-strung - a maintenance project of the first order.

Robert Dallek

#44. The Missourians I hear from just don't buy the idea that the only way to tackle the national debt is to drastically alter Medicare and Social Security.

Claire McCaskill

#45. I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation's largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations.

John Perkins

#46. My major focus is national security because that's really what the president runs.

Rudy Giuliani

#47. What's the top area of concern? What's the top issue? National security. That is what people think about night. 'Are my children going to be safe? Am I going to be safe when I'm out and about in the community?'

Marsha Blackburn

#48. Mitt Romney understands the importance of Alaska as a leader in our country's energy production and I look forward to working with him on such an important economic and national security matter.

Lisa Murkowski

#49. It is often in the name of cultural integrity as well as social stability and national security that democratic reforms based on human rights are resisted by authoritarian governments.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#50. One of the critical issues that we have to confront is illegal immigration, because this is a multi-headed Hydra that affects our economy, our health care, our health care, our education systems, our national security, and also our local criminality.

Allen West

#51. President Reagan, of course, did more than any other person to entrench the Republican reputation for toughness on national security.

Samantha Power

#52. For more than 20 years, on every one of the great issues of freedom and security, John Kerry has been more wrong, more weak and more wobbly than any other national figure.

Zell Miller

#53. A modern, autonomous, and thoroughly trained Air Force in being at all times will not alone be sufficient, but without it there can be no national security.

Henry H. Arnold

#54. You got any experience? (Carlos)
I'm former army intelligence, Special Forces, on contract to the U.S. government now for national security. That good enough for you, amigo? (Stoner)
It'll do. (Carlos)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#55. When the National Security Agency recruited me, they put me through a day of lie detector tests. They found out all my weaknesses and immediately seduced me. They used the strongest drugs in our culture, sex, power and money, to win me over.

John Perkins

#56. The Silent Service is all together too silent. It's important to begin to highlight the critical importance of the Silent Service to our national security.

Rob Simmons

#57. The Committee's review of a series of intelligence shortcomings, to include intelligence prior to 9/11 and the pre-war intelligence on Iraq, clearly reveal how vital a diverse intelligence workforce is to our national security.

Jane Harman

#58. The high prices also highlight the fact that the U.S. is too heavily dependent on fossil fuels that we import from unstable parts of the world. To protect our national security, we must become more energy secure.

Dan Lipinski

#59. When President Obama asked Congress to raise the debt ceiling $2 trillion and offered sequestration as an offset, I opposed it. I did not believe we should put the country $2 trillion deeper in debt and impose irresponsible massive cuts to our national security.

Mike Turner

#60. I'm a national security liberal, which I tell people because it's meant to sound absurd.

Rachel Maddow

#61. It is, of course, true that I have given priority to the settling of the problem of security and the problem of Irian Barat, although I knew that in order to do these things, almost three-quarters of our national product had to be spent.

Sukarno

#62. I will not, nor will I ever, publicly divulge sensitive intelligence sources and methods. For when that happens, our national security is endangered and lives can be lost.

John O. Brennan

#63. Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today's Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator. And nothing makes this Marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators.

Zell Miller

#64. One of the great threats to our national security is social cohesion. If people no longer believe that you can start out anywhere and end up at the top successfully in America, that the American dream is part of the past, I think that erodes a sense of belief and confidence in our nation.

Joel Klein

#65. Our biggest national security threat is the environmental destruction of our planet and the arms race with ourselves.

Jello Biafra

#66. We do not deny any nation's legitimate interest in security. But protecting the security of one nation by robbing another of its national independence and national traditions is not legitimate. In the long run, it is not even secure.

Ronald Reagan

#67. Homeland security requires a secure homeland currency.

Janet M. Tavakoli

#68. The country that owns green, that dominates that industry, is going to have the most energy security, national security, economic security, competitive companies, healthy population and, most of all, global respect.

Thomas Friedman

#69. It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the state governments will in all possible contingencies afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.

Alexander Hamilton

#70. Defense, national security, and law enforcement now eat up 34 percent of the Russian budget, more than double the share in 2010. That dwarfs the 18 percent spent by the U.S. last year on defense and national security, according to the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Anonymous

#71. It is not patriotic to commit young Americans to war unless our national security clearly requires it.

George McGovern

#72. It is a longstanding principle that sitting national security advisers do not testify before the Congress.

Condoleezza Rice

#73. It is without doubt that freedoms of the press and speech need to be protected, but there are undisputed limits to these freedoms, limits that often come into play when national security is threatened.

Charles B. Rangel

#74. Every portal coming into this country is being attacked by those who would harvest information, both national security secrets and just the common information of private individuals and private individuals. That crime is going on, every day, on a single entity known as the Internet.

Darrell Issa

#75. People were concerned about national security, and that precluded us from having the opportunity to break through on the issues that we cared most about - the economy, education and health care.

Tom Daschle

#76. I think overall our national security is strengthened if we are able to make the decisions that we need and the alliances that we believe in outside the current structures of the European Union.

Michael Gove

#77. I think that Joe Biden is qualified in many respects. But I do point out that he's been wrong on many foreign policy and national security issues, which is supposed to be his strength.

John McCain

#78. Counting obligations under Medicare and Social Security, the real debt of the United States is more than 10 times the reported national debt.

Addison Wiggin

#79. Most white Americans were willing to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of national security as long as they were the civil liberties of someone else.

Neil Nakadate

#80. It must be felt that there is no national security but in the nation's humble, acknowledged dependence upon God and His overruling providence.

Franklin Pierce

#81. The pupil's imagination is 'schooled' to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.

Ivan Illich

#82. It's basic due diligence to make sure that whenever a foreign entity acquires a controlling interest in a U.S. company that national security isn't threatened.

Dave Reichert

#83. Andrew Saul is John Hall in a business suit. He's wrong on the war, on national security, immigration, abortion. He's Sue Kelly all over again.

Andrew Saul

#84. I like a challenge. The fact that these are secret organizations, and also very important organizations that can engage in abuses that are so important to our national security - all that attracts me.

Ronald Kessler

#85. We have been using foreign affairs ministries to address security issues, but this practice is outdated. It's time to assign the handling of regional security to national organizations and expert institutions.

Enrique Pena Nieto

#86. The constitution had nothing to do with it. It was, after all, a matter of national security.

Stieg Larsson

#87. If the United States were to cut and run from Iraq, we would send a message of weakness that would embolden our terrorist enemies across the globe. A failed Iraq would destabilize the entire region and undermine U.S. national security for decades to come.

Dennis Cardoza

#88. National security is the fig leaf against freedom of information.

Ralph Nader

#89. So that all the people who say, you know, "All the media hates America." A lot of the media does hate America but this is a case of, actually, the press doing its best, I think, to do the right by national security. So good for them.

Tucker Carlson

#90. An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.

Wendell Berry

#91. Investments in women are positively correlated to growth, prosperity, stability, democracy, health - and vital to our national security. We cannot write off the talent of half the world and expect to confront our challenges.

Melanne Verveer

#92. Iran's nuclearization is the greatest single national security threat America faces.

Mitt Romney

#93. When the president went around the table to the country's national security leadership, Hillary was clear: We have to go get bin Laden. And our Special Operations Forces did just that.

Leon Panetta

#94. The War on Terror is one of the most critical national security efforts in our history.

Sue Kelly

#95. I'm fascinated by power, especially veiled power. Shadow power. The National Security Agency. The National Reconnaissance Office. Opus Dei. The idea that everything happens for reasons we're not quite seeing.

Dan Brown

#96. [A new all-encompassing national identification system] contradicts some of our most sacrosanct American principles of personal liberty and expectations of privacy and is far in excess of what is needed to provide us with the security and protections we all want.

Bill McCollum

#97. [N]othing is less reliable than unchecked claims from political officials that their secret conduct is justified by National Security Threats and the desire to Keep Us Safe.

Glenn Greenwald

#98. Next to upholding the Constitution of the United States, the president's highest duty is to protect the security of this country - our national security.

Wesley Clark

#99. Two years ago, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon described the Gaza Strip settlement of Netzarim as a vital part of Israel's national security and now he is going to leave. That is because of the 'effective armed struggle'.

Zuheir Mohsen

#100. Homes and buildings, many of which are old and drafty, eat up 40 percent of the energy America uses. Such inefficiencies perpetuate our reliance on foreign oil, imperiling our national security and increasing our contribution to climate change.

Peter Welch