I think there’s no question but what the tail end of the Bush administration, Bush-Cheney administration, that we took steps specifically geared to try and free up the financial sector.

That's the nature of the intelligence business. You have to work with what you can get your hands on, but it is.. and in fact it's more an art form than it is a science, and you have to continually work the problem, continually try.

You cannot be driven by the polls. The polls change all the time; they're easily manipulated by whoever wants to ask those poll questions; they go up; they go down.

Westerners know the difference between a talker and the real deal. If Rick Perry wasn't right to be governor of Texas, why should he be president?

Reagan proved that deficits don't matter.

One of the problems we have as a government is our inability to keep secrets. And it costs us, in terms of our relationship with other governments, in terms of the willingness of other intelligence services to work with us, in terms of revealing sources and methods. And all of those elements enter into some of these leaks.

The greatest threat now is a 9/11 occurring with a group of terrorists armed not with airline tickets and box cutters, but with a nuclear weapon in the middle of one of our own cities...there's a high probability of such an attempt.