Lapham’s Quarterly

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

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

Guard more faithfully the secret which is confided to you than the money which is entrusted to your care.

For sooner will men hold fire in their mouths than keep a secret.

Nothing is hidden from the eyes of the observing world.

Secrecy lies at the very core of power.

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.

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

We must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest.

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

Even a paranoid can have enemies.

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

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

Once suspicion is aroused, everything feeds it.

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.

A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

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

If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation.

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

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.

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

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.