69 Quotes by John O. Brennan

We will never abdicate the security of the United States to a foreign country or refrain from taking action when appropriate. But we cannot ignore the reality that cooperative counterterrorism activities are a key to our national defense.

The president's priority is to protect the safety and security of the American people. That's the physical security of the American people as well as the prosperity of the American people.

U.S. computer networks and databases are under daily cyber attack by nation states, international crime organizations, subnational groups, and individual hackers.

The United States does not view our authority to use military force against Al Qaeda as being restricted solely to 'hot' battlefields like Afghanistan.

Sometimes there are actions that we are forced to take, but there need to be boundaries beyond which we are going to recognize that we're not going to go because we still are Americans, and we are supposed to be representing something to people in this country and overseas.

As we've seen, deploying large armies abroad won't always be our best offense. Countries typically don't want foreign soldiers in their cities and towns.

It's not that the system is broken, but clearly there are ways to improve the system, strengthen it, to make sure that we can put together the various bits and pieces of information in a way that allows us to stop every single terrorist out there.

Any American who joins al Qaeda will know full well that they have joined an organization that is at war with the United States. Any American who did that should know well that they in fact are part of an enemy... and that the U.S. will do anything that is possible to destroy that enemy to save American lives.

I do not - I never believed it's better to kill a terrorist than to detain him. We want to detain as many terrorists as possible so we can elicit the intelligence from them in the appropriate manner so that we can disrupt follow-on terrorist attacks.