Best 10 quotes of Jeh Johnson on MyQuotes

If you build - if you spend billions of taxpayer dollars to build a wall over, let's say, a mountain, if you build a 10-foot wall over a 10,000-foot mountain, and someone is determined to climb the 10,000-foot mountain, they're not going to be deterred by the 10-foot wall. It's a matter of common sense.

I'll never forget what a Catholic priest told me; he said, "If you try to padlock the door, you have to give people an alternative path - an alternative, safer path. You can't padlock, and you shouldn't padlock a burning building.

I think that ISIS is a problem and it's really a symptom of a much greater problem.

I think that the potential for homegrown terrorist attacks is something that we have to be very concerned about, because, in many respects, it's harder to detect when you have an independent actor who may be living in our midst, in our own communities.

Politics, in my judgment, has become not just the means to a policy ends, but it's become the end itself. Politics has become the sport that we all watch, and we all pay attention to.

President Trump talks about extreme vetting, and we actually do have extreme vetting when it comes to refugee resettlement. Refugee resettlement is the most thorough, cumbersome, multilayered vetting system we have for the admission of anyone to the country.

The good news is that the international coalition, in which our military contributes, has done a lot to reduce the ground space, the territory in Iraq, Syria that ISIL once occupied a couple years ago. That's a good thing. And a lot of that, frankly, has occurred in Trump administration, so I'll give them credit for that.

There's a lot of sensitivity about federal involvement in elections around the country. I think that it would be appropriate to consider - whether there should be some basic federal minimum standards to the cybersecurity around the election infrastructure. We have federal standards for aviation security, for auto safety, for a lot of things, and elections are pretty important in the country.

The Secret Service hates to complain about something. They're secret by nature. They're not boastful; they don't like to be in the limelight. And therefore, they need middle management, i.e., a Cabinet-level person, to be their advocate, to Congress, to the White House, to ensure that they have adequate funding.

We are very definitely in a new phase in the global terrorist threat where the so-called lone wolf could strike at any moment.