Operations Department Quotes & Sayings

Funding for the Special Operations Network comes directly from the government. Most work is centralized, but all of the SpecOps divisions have local representatives to keep a watchful eye on any provincial problems. They are administered by local commanders, who liaise with the national offices for information exchange, guidance and policy decisions. Like any other big government department, it looks good on paper but is an utter shambles. Petty infighting and political agendas, arrogance and sheer bloody-mindedness almost guarantees that the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing. — Jasper Fforde

In Japan, no one could dictate effectively to either army or navy. To an extraordinary degree, the two services - each with its own air force - pursued independent war policies, though the soldiers wielded much greater clout. The foremost characteristic of the army general staff, and especially of its dominant operations department, the First Bureau, was absolute indifference to the diplomatic or economic consequences of any military action. Mamoru — Max Hastings

You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself ... the height of a man's success is gauged by his self-mastery; the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment ... And this law is the expression of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others. — Leonardo Da Vinci

The idea that a musician can submit music online for the chance to have it promoted to a nationwide audience is the American dream come true, and a major step toward democratizing how music is discovered. — Ali Partovi

It is important to remember that bureaucratic politics and rivalry are not just matters of competing for primacy in foreign policy - although they are that too. Rather, most bureaucratic competition comes from the fact that these bureaucracies often have overlapping jurisdictions on policy matters and that each may have legitimate but differing responsibilities. For example, both the CIA and the Defense Department have large intelligence-gathering operations, and at times these overlap and compete; at the same time, the State Department and Defense Department both have important but very different responsibilities in American foreign policy-making, and it is quite understandable that these are not always in exact accord. — Howard J. Wiarda

Man did not enter society to be worse off, or to have fewer rights, but rather to have those rights better secured — Thomas Paine

Latinos outnumber Black people now. I'm not too happy about it. Because it's only a matter of time before we lose our month. Soon as they figure it out, they're going to have Latino History Month. All we're going to have is Cinco de Negro. — Alonzo Bodden

Essentially Rumsfeld wins, Cheney wins, and the CIA and State Department lose. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have more centralized control over intelligence, analysis, and operations than ever before. And the way they interpret the law, if the President authorizes an intelligence mission to be run covertly by the Pentagon, they don't have to tell anybody, including Congress, about it because the President is the commander in chief. — Seymour Hersh

The Defense Department's plan to ban newspaper reporters from pool coverage of military operations is incredible. It reveals the administration to be out of touch with journalism, reality and the First Amendment. — Arthur Ochs Sulzberger

We have to remind the people: Congress has the constitutional obligation and public responsibility to oversee these issues and the Department of Justice's operations. — Sibel Edmonds

Stellar Wind blew past the Supreme Court on the authority of a dubious opinion sent to the White House the week that the Patriot Act became law. It came from John Yoo, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel who had clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. Yoo wrote that the Constitution's protections against warrantless searches and seizures did not apply to military operations in the United States. The NSA was a military agency; Congress had authorized Bush to use military force; therefore he had the power to use the NSA against anyone anywhere in America. The — Tim Weiner

I'm not Mother Teresa. But I'm not Frank Bough, either. I am getting older and a bit more sensible. I'm not going to be popping up in dungeons every six months. If you catch me preaching fidelity while I am shagging chickens then throw the book at me. Otherwise, leave me alone. — Steve Coogan

America, secure in its fortress of neutrality, watched the war at a remove and found it all unfathomable. Undersecretary of State Robert Lansing, number two man in the State Department, tried to put this phenomenon into words in a private memorandum. "It is difficult, if not impossible, for us here in the United States to appreciate in all its fullness the great European War," he wrote. "We have come to read almost with indifference of vast military operations, of battle lines extending for hundreds of miles, of the thousands of dying men, of the millions suffering all manner of privation, of the wide-spread waste and destruction." The nation had become inured to it all, he wrote. "The slaughter of a thousand men between the trenches in northern France or of another thousand on a foundering cruiser has become commonplace. We read the headlines in the newspapers and let it go at that. The details have lost their interest. — Erik Larson

The Special Operations Network was instigated to handle policing duties considered either too unusual or too specialized to be tackled by the regular force. There were thirty departments in all, starting at the more mundane Neighborly Disputes (SO-30) and going onto Literary Detectives (SO-27) and Art Crime (SO-24). Anything below SO-20 was restricted information, although it was common knowledge that the ChronoGuard was SO-12 and Antiterrorism SO-9. It is rumored that SO-1 was the department that polices the SpecOps themselves. Quite what the others do is anyone's guess. What is known is that the individual operatives themselves are mostly ex-military or ex-police and slightly unbalanced. 'If you want to be a SpecOp,' the saying goes, 'act kinda weird ... — Jasper Fforde

Within minutes of the attack, your Department of Public Safety mobilized its Operations Center, headed by a national expert on weapons of mass destruction. — Jane D. Hull