A. J. P. Taylor Quotes

If we cannot keep secrets, it is impossible for our leaders to have the adequate information on which to base their policies.

Sylvia loved secrets and even if she didn't have any secrets she made sure that you thought she did. Amelia had no secrets, Amelia knew nothing. When she grew up she planned to know everything and to keep it all a secret.

In Russia everything is a secret, but there is no secrecy.

In most cases, cables are marked secret not because the U.S. requires it but because those speaking to us - the foreign leaders across the table - do. They are not keeping secrets from us, but from two other groups: their enemies and their subjects.

When you're told to go brief a United States senator on a covert operation, you go do it. And you trust the information isn't going to leak.

In intelligence work, there are limits to the amount of information one can share. Confidentiality is essential.

Diplomacy is, perhaps, one element of the U.S. government that should not be subject to the demands of 'open government'; whenever it works, it is usually because it is done behind closed doors. But this may be increasingly hard to achieve in the age of Twittering bureaucrats.

When it comes to international negotiations it cannot all be kept confidential and secret. There must be a way of preparing publics for what is being negotiated.

There’s no town in the world that has the leaks that come out of this town. [Washington, DC.]

The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to hide from the President of the United States.

It is sometimes necessary to keep matters secret among a few.

This gentleman feels that all the members of Congress should have access to all the information which is in the hands of officials in the executive branch who deal with foreign affairs. He states that this is so in England and France. I think the gentleman must be mistaken, for it would be "agin" human nature for so many people to know a secret and keep it! Much of the information which comes to officials dealing with foreign affairs is uncorroborated, but valuable as background material. The sources of this information would soon dry up if it became the property of too many people. It seems to me that in foreign affairs, as in all matters of government, one must deal with reality, recognize human nature as it is and set up machinery to deal with real situations, not those which we wish existed.

Transparency has long been a rare commodity in international affairs. But today, the forces of technology are ushering in a new age of openness that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. Governments, journalists, and nongovernmental organ­izations (NGOs) can now harness a flood of open-source information, drawn from commercial surveillance satellites, drones, smartphones, and computers, to reveal hidden activities in contested areas—from Ukraine to Syria to the South China Sea.

Although governments will also benefit from improved access to information, increased transparency will allow people at home and abroad to better observe and critique what governments do and to hold leaders accountable for their decisions. As a result, governments will find it harder to adopt strategies that require secrecy or violate international norms.

There are many difficult things in this world to hide, but a secret is not one of them.

The only way to keep your secrets safe is to have none at all.

Once the Xerox copier was invented, private diplomacy died. There's no such thing as secrecy. It's just a question of whether it's leaked or revealed openly.

Don't have any more secrets than you can keep yourself.

It is vain to keep a secret from one who has a right to know it. It will tell itself.

Do people ever reflect, one wonders, that the best way to protect against the penetration of one's secrets by others is to have the minimum of secrets to conceal?

All confidence placed in another is dangerous if it is not perfect, for on almost all occasions we ought to tell everything or to conceal everything. We have already told too much of our secret, if one single circumstance is to be kept back.

He who guards his secrets retains control in his own hands

Oh, well, there's a difference between privacy and secrecy.

I'm not going into personal details of meetings I have with anybody, be it John Howard or President Bush or President Putin or President Yeltsin, in years gone by, whoever it may be, I'm not going into that.

Secrecy is the foundation of politics.