Edward Snowden Quotes

The life of spies is to know, not bee known.

I really wanted to be a spy. I guess it's a bit like acting, where you play a role.

I'd be a terrible secret agent. I can't keep a secret and I'm not sneaky.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

What I really found was that the one similarity between 'Covert Affairs' and 'Fair Game' is a deep love and admiration and fascination with the home life of a spy.

Oh, I can keep many secrets, so I would be a phenomenal secret agent. I love secrets.

You can't be a real spy and have everybody in the world know who you are and what your drink is. That's just hysterically funny.

He was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession.

In my head, I think I'd make a perfect spy, but in reality, I don't think I'd fare very well.

However I dress it up, I was a spy and I am not proud of it.

I've always dreamt of having some sort of undercover job. I think it's probably the coolest thing in the world, but ultimately a very lonely life.

There is nobody I know by name who is concerned with collecting information for the Russian authorities. There are people whom I know by sight whom I trusted with my life.

I would be a terrible CIA officer in real life.

I spent a whole career infiltrating places.

For an old spy and codebreaker like myself, nothing in the world happens by coincidence.

I spent close to a decade as an undercover officer in the CIA and have spent most of my adult life collecting intelligence and protecting sources and methods.

Breaking a cardinal rule of spy craft, I actually let it be known that I wanted to work for the CIA.

I think everyone's always interested in playing a spy, right? That's something we grow up admiring, which is so strange, but it's just a very clever and quick world that we all want to be a part of.

If I was a spy, I would have a watch that would cloak me in invisibility.

Turns out, you can take the girl out of the spy school, but you can never take the spy school out of the girl.

That’s the thing about spies. Most of the secrets we keep are from each other.

Everybody thinks it's glamorous and this spy versus spy stuff is so exciting, but working in that industry and being a CIA operative, like a field officer, is tough. That's a difficult job that usually dismantles their lives in some capacity.

Someone responding to the story said 'real spies do not speak like that'. Well, I am a spy and that is how they talk. Whenever we had a debate in the office on how to handle crimes, they do not defend due process - they defend decisive action. They say it is better to kick someone out of a plane than let these people have a day in court. It is an authoritarian mindset in general.

I've met enough KGB colonels in my life.

With stealth technology, the U.S. could spy on its Cold War adversaries without running the risk of getting caught.