Friedrich Schiller Quotes

Having watched the form of our traitors for a number of years, I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilization. It's a lout's game.

You couldn't trust anyone or anything that belonged to the world of espionage.

A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life

Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.

There is only one law of espionage—there are always going to be spies.

If you set foot on your enemies' land, get spies on them. Choose those whom you count on for their truthfulness and advice, whether Arabs or inhabitants of that land. Liars' accounts would not benefit you, even if some of them were true; the deceiver is a spy against you and not for you.

This town leaks like a sieve. Sometimes I think that the easiest thing on the world would be to be a spy against the United States of America

If you’re going to be involved with espionage, you’ve got to be motivated. It’s not fun and games. It’s dirty and dangerous. There’s always the chance that you’re going to get burned.

It's a very dangerous and lonely thing, I imagine, to be a spy: to have friendships that are deceptions, that are not honest.

Former CIA employee Joseph Weisberg's 'An Ordinary Spy' may attract attention for how much it redacts - whether by authorial choice or by CIA design - but its power comes from the growing frustration Weisberg's fictional alter ego feels at a system designed to betray seeming innocents in the most casual and cruel manner possible.

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

Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity.

Betrayal, in one form or another, is at the very heart of the world of intelligence.

The Confederates had suspected Wild Bill of being a spy for two or three days, and had watched him closely.

He who knows how to flatter also knows how to slander.

They were conspiring to desert us in the night and steal some of our horses... we engaged a spy.

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

I handed over names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union.

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

It is essential to seek out enemy agents who have come to conduct espionage against you and to bribe them to serve you. Give them instructions and care for them. Thus doubled agents are recruited and used.

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

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

Perhaps my information hurt the Soviet Union more than it helped. I have no idea. It was not something I ever discussed with the KGB officers that I was dealing with.

Spy plots are hard, really hard.

Every department in Washington…contained numerous traitors and spies.