Eric Ambler Quotes

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.

I think I'm probably an assassin and not a Templar, but no doubt we're probably run by people with Templar mentalities.

This murder of Hariri was deliberately planned and executed precisely to implicate Syria and to set in train the events which have unfolded.

In reality the workings of your governing system are opaque and covert, while hiding in the chattering spotlight of an ostensible transparency, even though the ultimate objective is clear.

Secrecy is the foundation of politics.

Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.

I think in the corridors of power these dangerous kinds of orders are issued in a much more vague way, passed down two or three levels of command before they're given to the assassin.

The lower caste people were killed as part of a conspiracy to dismiss my party's government.

People tend to see power carried out by conspiracy. It's easy to believe in.

Regardless of moral considerations, assassination is a wrongheaded tool for a great power, because small powers can use it equally if not more effectively.

We were falling deeper and deeper into a secret running of the government.

Central Intelligence Agency’s Intention To Send Hoodlums to Cuba to Assassinate Castro

I came to the conclusion that there was some sort of conspiracy, probably involving the mob, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, and maybe rogue CIA agents.

In some townships, political parties are run by thugs financed from Cape Town. If we don't have support of the police, we can not have the ability to organize and to gain even a slight semblance of power.

Everything is a conspiracy. People kind of demonize the word. But a conspiracy is when two people get together and do something. So, if more than one person does something, it's a conspiracy. The revolution was a conspiracy, Iran Contra, Watergate.

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.

People went out there and they wrote articles and went on television shows saying that I am an operative that the CIA who used Jon Stewart to recruit me. So Jon Stewart, who actually - a guy from America was used by the CIA in order to recruit me for the CIA and be - make me a CIA agent to use sarcasm to bring down the government and bring down the country because this was all, of course, part of a worldwide conspiracy against the country.

For the Order wishes to be secret and to work in silence; for thus it is better secured from the oppression of the ruling powers, and because this secrecy gives a greater zest to the whole.

Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.

Power expands through the distribution of secrecy.

Is it going to make me feel any better to make an extra million? That million might be more important to the team.

If, for example, a conspiratorially minded elite is so powerful, has at its fingertips such multiple and delicate instruments with which to fine-tune accumulation, then how can the periodic headlong slides into crisis be explained?

You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time they will.

The king hath note of all that they intend, by interception which they dream not of.

If you have to tell someone they call the shots, they're not really calling the shots.