#intelligence

This president has been reluctant to hold anybody accountable. No one was held accountable after September the 11th. Nobody's been held accountable after the clear flaws in intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq. ↗

— Bob Graham

#after #anybody #been #clear #flaws

Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency; the bulk is written for the bourgeoisie, leaving a lean cut for labor. Only the hermetically aimed has a snowball's chance in hell of reaching its intended ears. One proceeds from this realization. A staggering figure of vibrant, intelligent people can and do live without poetry, especially without the poetry of their time. This figure includes the unemployed, the rank and file, the union brass, banker, scientist, lawyer, doctor, architect, pilot, and priest. It also includes most academics, most of the faculty of the humanities, most allegedly literary editors and most allegedly literary critics. They do so--go forward in their lives, toward their great reward, in an engulfing absence of poetry--without being perceived or perceiving themselves as hobbled or deficient in any significant way. It is nearly true, though I am often reminded of a Transtromer broadside I saw in a crummy office building in San Francisco: We got dressed and showed the house You live well the visitor said The slum must be inside you. If I wanted to understand a culture, my own for instance, and if I thought such an understanding were the basis for a lifelong inquiry, I would turn to poetry first. For it is my confirmed bias that the poets remain the most 'stunned by existence,' the most determined to redeem the world in words.. ↗

— C.D. Wright

#poetry #poets #intelligence

Man is made or unmade by himself. By the right choice he ascends. As a being of power, intelligence, and love, and the lord of his own thoughts, he holds the key to every situation. ↗

— James Allen

#being #choice #every #himself #his

There are so many things a large intelligence espionage organization can do to justify its existence, that people can get promotions for, because it could result in results. ↗

— Aldrich Ames

#could #espionage #existence #get #intelligence

God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given us, on this side of the grave. ↗

— Francis Bacon

#exercise #given #god #grave #intellect

If you look at military and intelligence positions from the 1950s, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always been against American national interests. ↗

— King Abdullah II

#always #american #been #conflict #intelligence

But the technology was accessible, which suggests incompetence on the part of our counterintelligence community and the Clinton Administration, and may in fact rise to the level of treason. ↗

— Charles Foster Bass

#administration #clinton #clinton administration #community #counterintelligence

The Queen's intelligence network is a hell of a lot better than anyone's in this palace. Bar none. She knows everything. I don't know how she does it. And she sees everything. ↗

— Prince Andrew

#bar #better #does #everything #hell

Why did the Clinton Administration wait from 1995 to 1998 to tighten security and bolster counterintelligence at U.S. weapons labs? ↗

— Charles Foster Bass

#bolster #clinton #clinton administration #counterintelligence #did

The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force. ↗

— George Bancroft

#brute force #civilization #common #common mind #degree