Quotes About Government Secrecy

#1. Secrecy is for losers ... It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most persuasive of Cold War-era regulations. It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness that is already upon us.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#2. There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States, but around the world.

Glenn Greenwald

#3. I have no doubt that the nation has suffered more from undue secrecy than from undue disclosure. The government takes good care of itself.

Daniel Schorr

#4. According to these new rules, the U.S. government was free to use the methods it had developed in the 1950s under layers of secrecy and deniability - only now it was out in the open, without fear of prosecution.

Naomi Klein

#5. the current limits on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance.

Mickey Huff

#6. The pathological degree to which former Vice President Dick Cheney operated in secrecy led to government abuses that we'll probably spend years learning about.

Timothy Noah

#7. When you can't do any housecleaning because everything that goes on is a damned secret, then we're on our way to something the Founding Fathers didn't have in mind. Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix.

Harry S. Truman

#8. A government by secrecy benefits no one. It injures the people it seeks to serve; it damages its own integrity and operation. It breeds distrust, dampens the fervor of its citizens and mocks their loyalty.

Russell B. Long

#9. It's a difficult thing today to be informed about our government even without all the secrecy.

Donald Rumsfeld

#10. The atomic weapons race and the secrecy surrounding it crushed American democracy. It induced us to conduct government according to lies. It distorted justice. It undermined American morality.

Stewart Udall

#11. Gratitude is the payment for what we have received. It also opens our hearts to fill our lives with abundance.

Debasish Mridha

#12. The government's instinct is to shroud itself in secrecy - to act like the office of a president instead of as a collective cabinet government held to account by the elected House of Commons.

Charles Kennedy

#13. I have throughout been curious about how much we can be said to know and with what degree of certainty or doubtfulness.

Bertrand Russell

#14. One of the things I think is really problematic about something like [government] spyware is that it isn't transparent - because of that anonymity and that secrecy, there aren't laws to regulate it.

Maggie Gyllenhaal

#15. I had always been a fan of Nas, but I never met him. This is the one guy in the industry who's, like, the phantom rapper.

Kelis

#16. Authoritarianism and secrecy breed incompetence; the two feed on each other. It's a vicious cycle. Governments with authoritarian tendencies point to what is in fact their own incompetence as the rationale for giving them yet more power.

Josh Marshall

#17. If you want to achieve what you dream of achieving, whatever it may be, you're going to have to earn it.

Miles D. White

#18. We plan to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding the preparation of the budget. We also plan to open up the process of government appointments.

Kim Campbell

#19. Leaks are good. There is too much secrecy in our government. Sometimes the government knows about a problem and it takes a leak to embarrass the bureaucracy and get them to do something about it.

Joan Claybrook

#20. Nobody in the government is talking. They say it's a case of national security.

Kenneth Eade

#21. Anyone who studies declassified documents soon becomes aware that government secrecy is largely an effort to protect policy makers from scrutiny by citizens, not to protect the country from enemies.

Noam Chomsky

#22. Given the pervasive secrecy of the Bush-Cheney administration, and the sorry consequences of that disposition, President Barack Obama's early emphasis on openness in government seems almost inevitable.

Noah Feldman

#23. What if, I never tire of asking, we said 'Secret Council' instead of the archaic and therefore cuddly 'Privy Council'?

Christopher Hitchens

#24. the U.S. government has a long history of overclassifying information that shouldn't be classified at all - and keeping information classified until long after any justification for classifying it has disappeared.

Rosa Brooks

#25. Government ought to be all outside and no inside ... Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety.

Woodrow Wilson

#26. Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.

Jeremy Bentham

#27. I am absolutely opposed to a national ID card. This is a total contradiction of what a free society is all about. The purpose of government is to protect the secrecy and the privacy of all individuals, not the secrecy of government. We don't need a national ID card.

Ron Paul

#28. But I didn't even see God in the show as being very spiritual, I see him or her, it, as being something that is just relevant and very important in her life.

Amber Tamblyn

#29. Secret government programs that pry into people's private affairs are bound up with ideas about secrecy and privacy that arose during the process by which the mysterious became secular.

Jill Lepore

#30. Excessive administration secrecy ... feeds conspiracy theories and reduces the public's confidence in government.

John McCain

#31. Healthy bodies make healthy babies so you have nothing to lose!

Heidi Murkoff