Words&Dirt

“‘Highborn people make poor servants. They are disobedient, resentful, thoughtless, touchy, and they think they’re working hard even though they do less than everyone else––so they cause trouble among the rest of the staff.’ He shrugged. ‘This is my experience.’”

––The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, loc. 6638

“We make much in American courts about our willingness to let the guilty go free to protect the innocent. Benjamin Franklin summarized it: ‘It is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person should suffer.’ But that is a process of assigning guilt and meting out punishment after an evil has been done, with time not a factor, and with the appropriate standard of proof being beyond reasonable doubt.

None of that applies to intelligence, where the evil is pending, time is always critical, and where the objective is to enable action even in the face of continued doubt.”

––Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, by Michael V. Hayden, pg. 280