Lynne Truss Quotes
It used to be just CIA agents with ear-pieces who walked round with preoccupied, faraway expressions, and consequently regarded all the little people as irrelevant scum. Now, understandably, it's nearly everybody.
Truss, Lynne. Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Lock the Door. Profile Books, 2005.
about Iraq possessing weapons or mass destruction This is the one of the kind of statements which many felt were prevarications to justify the President’s desire to invade Iraq. See {618461} for an example of the reaction that was generated.
Kennedy was not being literal, but was sarcastically joking about the overemphasis that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI leadership was placing on investigating civil rights leaders and communists instead of investigating the hundreds of Southern murders and assaults on civil rights workers and organized crime. The FBI leadership was itself quite racist at the time, and Hoover never wanted to take on organized crime. He did not regard organized crime as an existential threat to the United States (the way he did about civil rights demonstrations) and he feared that with the big money available to organized crime, many of his agents would be corrupted.
This quotation illustrates a classic problem with the Central Intelligence Agency. Other agencies, like the State Department’s budgets are open and journalists publicize large houses and other high expenditures. The Central Intelligence Agency, in contrast, operates in secret, and there is not the same outside pressure for prudence. In addition to a lack of prudence with CIA expenditure as a result of no public oversight, the other agencies are jealous of the CIA staff and there “perks”.
Lynne Truss is an English author, journalist, novelist, and radio broadcaster and dramatist. She is arguably best known for her championing of correctness and aesthetics in the English language, which is the subject of her popular and widely discussed 2003 book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. The book was inspired by a BBC Radio 4 show about punctuation, Cutting a Dash, which she presented.
