Archive

Quotes

I 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, 1863

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

—Quentin Crisp, 1968

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

—George Herbert, c. 1621

Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any program our fear has sketched out.

—George Eliot, 1860

If you read somebody’s diary, you get what you deserve.

—David Sedaris, 2004

There is a sickness among tyrants: they cannot trust their friends.

—Aeschylus, c. 458 BC

Spies are of no use nowadays. Their profession is over. The newspapers do their work instead.

—Oscar Wilde, 1895

Even a paranoid can have enemies.

—Henry Kissinger, 1977

Secrets define us, they mark us, they set us apart from all the others. The secrets which we preserve provide a key to who we are, deep down.

—Nuruddin Farah, 1998

Once suspicion is aroused, everything feeds it.

—Amelia Edith Barr, 1885

The first duty of a good inquisitor is to suspect especially those who seem sincere to him.

—Umberto Eco, 1980

It was funny how I could feel all alone and under surveillance at the same time.

—Cory Doctorow, 2013

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

—Arthur Conan Doyle, 1891