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Center of the universe Quote by Tim Weiner

“Washington was a small town run by people who believed that they lived in the center of the universe.” quote by Tim Weiner — Download Open image

““Washington was a small town run by people who believed that they lived in the center of the universe.””

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“Stellar Wind resurrected Cold War tactics with twenty-first-century technology. It let the FBI work with the NSA outside of the limits of the law.”

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“The president and the vice president wanted the FBI to execute searches in secret, avoiding the strictures of the legal and constitutional standards set by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The answer was Stellar Wind. The NSA would eavesdrop freely against Americans and aliens in the United States without probable cause or search warrants. It would mine and assay the…

“On December 4, 1998, the headline on the President’s Daily Brief, the most secret intelligence document in the government of the United States, read: “Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.” It was a secondhand report picked up by the CIA from the Egyptian intelligence service, but no one ever had seen anything like it. “Bin Ladin…

“Intelligence fails because it is human, no stronger than the power of one mind to understand another. (480)”

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“Where were the weapons of mass destruction? he asked. Did they exist at all? They did not, Saddam said. It had been a long-running bluff, a deception intended to keep the Iranians, the Israelis, and the Americans at bay. “We destroyed them. We told you,” he told Piro on February 13, 2004. “By God, if I had such weapons, I…

“The other day we hauled in a guy named Abu Zubaydah,” President Bush said at a Republican fund-raiser in Greenwich, Connecticut, on April 9.…

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“The attorney general also spelled out some of the authorities the FBI would use under the Patriot Act, which passed the Senate that same day: capturing e-mail addresses, tapping cell phones, opening voice-mails, culling credit card and bank account numbers from the Internet. All of this would be done under law, he said, with subpoenas and search warrants. But the…

“Mueller was embroiled in another ferocious argument over the rule of law and the role of the FBI as the interrogation fight festered. Vice President Cheney had wanted to send the American military to a Muslim enclave in Lackawanna, a dead-end upstate New York town by the Canadian border. The troops were going to seize six suspected al-Qaeda supporters—all of…

“In mid-September Soufan talked to an al-Qaeda prisoner named Ramzi Binalshibh, who was chained naked to the floor in a CIA black prison at the Bagram air base outside Kabul. He said he was starting to obtain “valuable actionable intelligence” before CIA officers ordered him to stop talking forty-five minutes later. On September 17, they flew their prisoner to a…

“On June 20, 1951, less than four weeks after the Homer case broke, Hoover escalated the FBI’s Sex Deviates Program. The FBI alerted universities and state and local police to the subversive threat, seeking to drive homosexuals from every institution of government, higher learning, and law enforcement in the nation. The FBI’s files on American homosexuals grew to 300,000 pages…

“Then, on December 14, 1999, an alert United States Customs agent in Port Angeles, Washington, stopped a nervous twenty-three-year-old Algerian named Ahmed Ressam who was crossing over from Canada on the last ferry of the evening. He had explosives in his trunk and plans to blow them up at the Los Angeles International Airport. The case galvanized the government into…

“On July 6, he gave a speech to newspaper and television executives at the great columned building housing the National Archives and the original copy of the Constitution of the United States. “When I see those columns,” he said, “I think of what happened to Greece and Rome.” “They lost their will to live,” he said. “They became subject to…

Explore all 33 Tim Weiner quotes

More Center of the universe quotes

The Tao is the center of the universe, the good man's treasure, the bad man's refuge. Honors can be bought with fine words, respect can be won with good deeds; but the Tao is beyond all value, and no one can achieve it. Thus, when a new leader is chosen, don't offer to help him with your wealth or your…

Gregory Hines was the most talented man I've ever met or seen. Gregory Hines is one of those people that whenever he talked to…

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One of the things that was kind of shocking for humans... was to come to terms with was the fact that, hey, we may…

Kevin J. Anderson

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Hence I feel no shame in asserting that this whole region engirdled by the moon, and the center of the earth, traverse this grand circle amid the rest of the planets in an annual revolution around the sun. Near the sun is the center of the universe. Moreover, since the sun remains stationary, whatever appears as a motion of the…

Nicolaus Copernicus

I am not the center of the universe. And it's a lesson that I keep having to learn; it's my ongoing work, I'd say.…

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“if I wanted to be the center of the universe I’d have a dog.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

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People want to be at the center of the Universe...and they're going to flock to anybody who tells them that.

Victor J. Stenger

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You're making yourself too important. Guilt comes from feeling we're at the center of the universe. We're not.

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“Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them. If we see religion and art as the historically preferred methods of coming to terms with this Ache, then what happens to art when our technological and…

Jonathan Franzen

The ideas of directing attention outward, trying to imagine other people complexly, trying not to see myself as the center of the universe -…

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“The biblical account of the origin of the cosmos in Genesis, for example, posits that a god created the physical universe particularly with human beings in mind, and so unsurprisingly placed the Earth at the center of creation. Modern cosmological knowledge has refuted such an account. We are living in the golden age of cosmology: More has been discovered about…

Even as I'm shoveling up my hooter, I realize the sad truth. Coke bores me, It bores us all. We're jaded cunts, in a scene we hate, a city we hate, pretending that we're at the center of the universe, trashing ourselves with crap drugs to stave off the feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, aware that all…

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