Briefing quotes:

Send

These stories about my intellectual capacity really get under my skin. You know, for a while I even thought my staff believed it. There on my schedule first thing every morning it said, 'Intelligence Briefing.' -- George W. Bush
The press briefing today I believe has lost much of its usefulness. -- Marlin Fitzwater
George W. Bush attended the intelligence briefing every day. Obama has not even attended half of them. He sends surrogates. That to me is significant. -- Rush Limbaugh
The function of a briefing paper is to prevent the ambassador from saying something dreadfully indiscreet. I sometimes think its true object is to prevent the ambassador from saying anything at all. -- Kingman Brewster, Jr.
For all of us, self-briefing before going out or starting a project sharpens artistic wit. -- Robert Genn
The White House is giving George W. Bush intelligence briefings. You know? some of these jokes just write themselves. -- David Letterman
The most important conversations, briefings, meeting, and lectures you will ever have will be those you hold with yourself in the privacy of your own mind. -- Denis Waitley
Wait a minute! I'm not interested in agriculture. I want the military stuff. During a briefing military stuff in which officials began telling him about missile silos. -- Sean William Scott
I'm the chairman of the intelligence committee. We don't only get formal briefings, but we collect our information from the intelligence community in a variety of ways. -- Mike Rogers
Despite claims by some to the contrary, we have heard numerous times in hearings and briefings by experts that existing technologies do not fully or effectively detect nuclear material. -- John Linder
John Kerry told Tom Ridge he was too busy to receive a Homeland Security briefing. I thought that was odd, since you're not supposed to ignore terrorist threats until after you become president. -- David Letterman
Here's a viewer's guide to BP media briefings. Whenever you hear someone with a British accent talking about this on behalf of British Petroleum they are not telling you the truth. That's the bottom-line. -- Anthony Weiner
The Ambassador and the General were briefing me on the....the vast majority of Iraqis want to live in a peaceful, free world. And we will find these people and we will bring them to justice. -- George W. Bush
Jay Carney told the reporters at his morning briefing that he hoped they would watch the new movie about Obama's first term 'many times.' They might. Look how well 'Titanic' did at the box office. -- Fred Thompson
The quicker we get rid of the lobby system the better for all of us. I don't think in this day and age it is tenable to have these nods and winks, and on-the-record and off-the-record briefings. -- Charles Kennedy
The one thing that I remember from all of my intelligence briefings and my dealings with the Russians is that when you deal with the Russians, you have to deal with them from strength, not from weakness. -- Leon Panetta
At the G-20 summit, the White House accidentally listed a phone-sex line for journalists seeking an on-record briefing call for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. To which Bill said, 'Boy, did they get the wrong number.' -- Jay Leno
[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up. -- Alan Bennett
I've never seen a candidate - I've never seen a human being - who, with the most limited briefing, can understand the dimensions, the parameters, the nuances of everything of any kind of a policy or political problem. -- James Carville
He's got to do better than the shoddy piecing together of flimsy evidence that contradicts the briefings we have received by various agencies, .. I'm not hearing the same things at the briefings that I'm hearing from the president's top officials. -- Russ Feingold
The Clinton White House today said they would start to give national security and intelligence briefings to George Bush. I don't know how well this is working out. Today after the first one Bush said, 'I've got one question: What color is the red phone?' -- Bill Maher
Washington tends to be full of too many traps. I think reporters there do a lot of attending news briefings and news conferences expecting to get the real news out of those relatively sterile environments. But you've got to deal with the obscure people as well as the names. -- Tom Brokaw
Political reporters no longer get to decide what's news. The days when a minister gave briefings to a dozen lobby correspondents, and thereby dictated the next day's headlines, are over. Now, a thousand bloggers decide for themselves what is interesting. If enough of them are tickled then, bingo, you're news. -- Daniel Hannan
President Bush insisted that there was nothing in the August 6th, 2001 briefing, which was titled 'Bin Laden determined to attack the United States', that hinted what bin Laden was up to. Bush says that he would have moved mountains to stop the attack. Yeah, but he draws the line at reading a memo. -- David Letterman
Unlike most wars, which make rotten fiction in themselves - all plot and no characters, or made-up characters - Vietnam seems to be the perfect mix: the characters make the war, and the war unmakes the characters. The gods, fates, furies had a relatively small hand in it. The mess was man-made, a synthetic, by think tank out of briefing session. -- Wilfrid Sheed
If I were just to read briefing books or I were just to engage in the political back and forth, would I have heard what a big problem mental health is in New Hampshire? Would I have heard people say they're really worried about the impact on young people because New Hampshire has the highest tuition and debt problems in the country? i'm not sure I would have. -- Hillary Clinton
As press secretary, I spent countless hours defending the administration from the podium in the White House briefing room. -- Scott McClellan
When I traveled as secretary of state, I was deluged with thick briefing books full of information about the politics, economy, and culture of each destination, so those took up most of my reading time. -- Hillary Clinton
Well my briefing was that Honduras was a small and vulnerable country just back on the path towards democracy it was about to have just before I arrived, the first elections for a civilian president in more than 9 years. -- John Negroponte
I was given a White House - well, you will have to ask the White House that. But I asked to attend the White House briefing because I was, you know, because I wanted to report on the activities there. -- Jeff Gannon
No, I can tell you one of the first things that happens to a home secretary when they arrive in the job is that they are given a briefing about the security matters that they will be dealing with and I deal with security matters on a daily basis. -- Theresa May
We always get up about 5:30, and George gets up and goes in and gets the coffee and brings it to me, and that's been our ritual since we got married. And we read the newspapers in bed and drink coffee for about an hour probably, read our briefing papers. -- Laura Bush
Someday we'll learn the whole story of why George W. Bush brushed off that intelligence briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.' But surely a big distraction was the major speech he was readying for delivery on Aug. 9, his first prime-time address to the nation. -- Frank Rich
I'm a career Air Force officer. We have a saying in the Air Force: 'If you want people to be with you at the crash, you've got to put them on the manifest.' And so I was always of the view to almost leave no stone unturned when you're up there briefing the Hill. -- Michael Hayden
Ever get the feeling that sometime early in your life there must have been a briefing that you missed? -- Robert Breault
Certainly any president - Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative - should keep an open mind until they get the briefing. -- Charles Schumer
The White House press corps isn't there at a press briefing. It's not... They're not news gatherers there. There really isn't any media. -- Rush Limbaugh
I read a ton of paper every day. I read the newspapers, I read my intelligence materials, I read all the briefing materials. I read the newspaper in hard copy. -- Susan Rice

Send