It was funny how I could feel all alone and under surveillance at the same time.
—Cory Doctorow, 2013Quotes
To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968The life of spies is to know, not be known.
—George Herbert, c. 1621If you read somebody’s diary, you get what you deserve.
—David Sedaris, 2004The first duty of a good inquisitor is to suspect especially those who seem sincere to him.
—Umberto Eco, 1980There is a sickness among tyrants: they cannot trust their friends.
—Aeschylus, c. 458 BCWe must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any program our fear has sketched out.
—George Eliot, 1860Even a paranoid can have enemies.
—Henry Kissinger, 1977Spies are of no use nowadays. Their profession is over. The newspapers do their work instead.
—Oscar Wilde, 1895I will never again command an army in America if we must carry along paid spies. I will banish myself to some foreign country first.
—William Tecumseh Sherman, 1863For sooner will men hold fire in their mouths than keep a secret.
—Petronius, c. 60Once suspicion is aroused, everything feeds it.
—Amelia Edith Barr, 1885