Top 156 Quotes & Sayings by James Comey - Page 2

Martha Stewart is being prosecuted not for who she is but what she did.

We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account.

Folks are wandering around that proverbial parking lot of the Internet all day long, without giving it a thought to whose attachments they're opening, what sites they're visiting. And that makes it easy for the bad guys.

Senator Schumer is a partisan.

Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain. As new servers and equipment were employed, older servers were taken out of service, stored, and decommissioned in various ways.

Only a crazy person wouldn't fear approaching a car with tinted windows during a late-night car stop, or pounding up a flight of stairs to execute a search warrant, or fast-roping from a helicopter down into hostile fire. Real agents, like real people, feel that fear in the pit of their stomachs.

AOL had a very strong motive to create the appearance of high revenues for PurchasePro because the value of the warrants AOL had received in the deal depended on PurchasePro's performance.

There are those who've been hacked by the Chinese and those who don't know they've been hacked by the Chinese.

There is no doubt something has happened that is lasting in terms of attractiveness of the nightmare that is the Islamic State.

We don't want to put people in jail unless we prove that they knew they were doing something they shouldn't do.

I know there are other Elton Simpsons out there. But I also know there are Elton Simpsons out there I cannot see.

The Internet is the most dangerous parking lot imaginable. But if you were crossing a mall parking lot late at night, your entire sense of danger would be heightened. You would stand straight. You'd walk quickly. You'd know where you were going. You would look for light.

A lot of terrorists fled out of Afghanistan.

We can only query against that which we have collected. And so if someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interest reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home, but there will be nothing show up because we have no record of them.

WhatsApp has over a billion customers, and they are overwhelmingly good people. But in that billion customers are terrorists and criminals... It's a huge feature of terrorist tradecraft.

We have perpetrated a myth in our society that being brave means not being afraid, but that's wrong.

Not all of the Islamic State killers are going to die on the battlefield.

Even if information is not marked classified in an email, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.

Serious debates are taking place about how law enforcement personnel relate to the communities they serve, about the appropriate use of force.

ISIL is not your parents' al Qaeda. It's a very different model.

Folks who think organised crime is a thing of the past are only kidding themselves.

I have trouble applying the 'whistle-blower' label to someone who just disagrees with the way our country is structured and operates.

We've made great progress coordinating better as a government.

The attorney general called and asked me if I was willing to be interviewed for FBI director. And the truth is I told him I didn't think so, that I thought it was too much for my family. But that I would sleep on it and call him back in the morning. And so I went to bed that night convinced I was going to call him back and say no.

The threat that ISIL presents and poses to the United States is very different in kind, in type and degree than al Qaeda. ISIL is not your parents' al Qaeda. It's a very different model.

Although individual states have primary responsibility for conducting fair and impartial elections, the FBI becomes involved when paramount federal interests are affected or electoral abuse occurs.

Your parents' al Qaeda was a very different model than the threat we face today.

ISIL does something al-Qaida would never imagine: they test people by tasking them.

There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America.

It's not about the stuff. The issue is how we use that stuff and how do we train people to use that stuff. Do we use that stuff to confront people who are protesting in a community? Do we use a sniper rifle to see closer in a crowd? That's where it breaks down.

If you've ever talked to a special agent that you know well, and you ask he or she about a dangerous encounter they were involved in, they'll almost always give you the same answer: 'Yeah, I did it, but I was scared to heck the whole time.'

People view the police not as allies, but as antagonists, and think of them not with respect or gratitude, but with suspicion and distrust.

At some point, there is going to be a terrorist diaspora out of Syria like we've never seen before.

After years of police work, officers often can't help but be influenced by the cynicism they feel.

We all, white and black, carry various biases around with us.

Unfortunately, in places like Ferguson, in New York City and in some communities across this nation, there is a disconnect between police agencies and the citizens they serve, predominately in communities of color.

The Internet offers the ability for people to consume poison and radicalize entirely in private, either through a device they're holding in their hands or inside their house.

In today's YouTube world, are officers reluctant to get out of their cars and do the work that controls violent crime? Are officers answering 911 calls but avoiding the informal contact that keeps bad guys from standing around, especially with guns?

The Chattanooga killer was inspired by a foreign terror organization. It's hard to entangle which particular source... there are lots of competing poisons out there.

There's a perception that police are less likely to do the marginal additional policing that suppresses crime: the getting out of your car at 2 in the morning and saying to a group of guys, 'What are you doing here?'

FBI Miami is one of the top five offices. Not only are they responsible for all the work that goes on here in South Florida, but they are one of my international offices, so they cover kidnappings or counterintelligence matters or counterterrorism matters in the whole hemisphere.

America isn't easy. America takes work.

I worry a bit about the unknowns when it comes to travelers to the war zones in Syria and Iraq. Who don't I see? And I worry about the people who may be in their basements radicalizing that I can't see.

What makes the bravery of the men and women of the FBI so special is that they know exactly what they're in for. They spend weeks and weeks in an academy learning just how hard and dangerous this work is. Then they raise their right hands and take an oath and do that work anyway.

I was a high school senior and home alone one night with my younger brother. And a guy - gunman - kicked in our front door at our home in New Jersey and held the two of us captive. We escaped. He caught us again. We escaped again. So, a pretty horrific experience.

Cybercrime is becoming everything in crime. Again, because people have connected their entire lives to the Internet, that's where those who want to steal money or hurt kids or defraud go. So it's an epidemic for reasons that make sense.

I saw something in the news, so I copied it. I put a piece of tape - I have obviously a laptop, personal laptop - I put a piece of tape over the camera. Because I saw somebody smarter than I am had a piece of tape over their camera.

Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

The threat here focuses primarily on troubled souls in America who are being inspired or enabled online to do something violent for ISIL.

The notion that we would market devices that would allow someone to place themselves beyond the law troubles me a lot.

Do not let fear become disabling. That is what the terrorists want. They want you to imagine them in the shadows; they want you to imagine them as something greater than they are.

I don't know if it's true or not that folks are less likely to tell police when they see things.

As so often happened during the dot-com bubble days, the revenues that AOL and PurchasePro were counting on did not materialize. And instead of confronting that harsh reality, AOL and PurchasePro cooked up a scheme to inflate PurchasePro's revenues.

Many of us develop different flavors of cynicism that we work hard to resist because they can be lazy mental shortcuts.

The threat that ISIL presents and poses to the United States is very different in kind, in type and degree than al Qaeda.

The FBI is engaged in a myriad of efforts to combat cyber threats, from efforts focused on threat identification and sharing inside and outside of government, to our internal emphasis on developing and retaining new talent and changing the way we operate to evolve with the cyber threat.

I love strong encryption. It protects us in so many ways from bad people. But it takes us to a place - absolute privacy - that we have not been to before.

They do not want people committing violence, either in their community or in the name of their faith, and so some of our most productive relationships are with people who see things and tell us things who happen to be Muslim.

Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Responsible decisions also consider the context of a person's actions and how similar situations have been handled in the past.

We've investigated Chattanooga as a terror attack from the beginning.