Quotes by Michael Hayden

“Those same thoughts were going through my head as the ball was floating in there,”

“Obviously, we did it today, and hopefully it can continue rolling through the season, ... Weve got a lot of offensive talent and a lot of defensive talent, and with that talent we are going to score some goals.”

“I cant wait till a big game comes around, especially a Classic, ... Opening game, its going to be a big crowd playing on our own field. I thrive on that. I like playing in front of those kinds of crowds. I cant wait. I have so much confidence going in.”

“We are not out there as a vacuum cleaner, ... We dont have that capability and we dont want that capability.”

“They were told they shouldnt be supporting the arts, they should be supporting science research.”

“Everybody thinks scientists are cold and rational. The truth is that nothing could be more passionate than the search for scientific discoveries that break down barriers and change paradigms of thinking. Working with these artists was such an amazing experience that opened us up in ways we could never guess. We found that we had so much in common.”

“British talent is involved in the other films like the Constant Gardner and Id argue we are presenting the best of new British film-making talent in our New British Films strand,”

“Just because information is stolen, that doesnt make it more useful,”

“This program has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States.”

“I told them that free people always had to decide where to draw the line between their liberty and their security. I noted that the attacks would almost certainly push us as a nation more toward security.”

End strength - the total number of government employees you can have at the end of the year. Thats a separate exercise and requires independent energy, independent effort with the Congress to get the ceiling of your government employees raised.

NSA is a very conservative culture legally. Our lawyers at NSA were notorious for their conservatism up through the morning of September 11th, 2001. The single most consistent criticism of the NSA legal office by our congressional oversight committee was that our legal office was too conservative.

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, Its yet another great day to be the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The intelligence community is governed by the same legal and ethical standards as the rest of American government and society, but an operational imperative is here, too. An intelligence community charged with global responsibilities cannot be successful without diversity of thought, culture and language.

The first thing I did after getting a Masters degree - and the Air Force was very kind; they let me stay on at school to get a Masters - I went to Denver for the Armed Forces Air Intelligence School, six months. Fundamentally, we had a major effort on in Southeast Asia, and this was training folks to support that effort.

When I was at the CIA I asked my civilian advisory board to tackle some tough questions. Among the toughest: In a political culture that every day demands more transparency and more public accountability from every aspect of national life, could American intelligence continue to survive and succeed? That jury is still out.

I was an intelligence officer for what was then 8th Air Force, B-52 Air Force.

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

If we are going to conduct espionage in the future, we are going to have to make some changes in the relationship between the intelligence community and the public it serves.

An intelligence analyst may attribute an attack to al Qaeda, whereas a policy maker could opt for the more general extremist.