Espionage Quotes

• All warfare is based on deception. There is no place where espionage is not used. Offer the enemy bait to lure him.

  Sun Tzu

  War, Deception, Enemy

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• My understanding is that espionage means giving secret or classified information to the enemy. Since Snowden shared information with the American people, his indictment for espionage could reveal (or confirm) that the US Government views you and me as the enemy.

  Ron Paul

  Mean, Government, Views

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• There is no place where espionage is not possible.

  Sun Tzu

  Sun Tzu, Shang Yang (1997). “The Art of War”, p.53, Wordsworth Editions

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• Espionage, for the most part, involves finding a person who knows something or has something that you can induce them secretly to give to you. That almost always involves a betrayal of trust.

  Aldrich Ames

  Betrayal, Giving, Persons

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• Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.

  John le Carre

  Double Standard, World, Standards

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• 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.

  Sun Tzu

  War, Following Instructions, Giving

  "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu, translated by Chow-Hou Wee, (Chapter XIII), 2003.

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• All women are natural born espionage agents.

  Eddie Cantor

  Keeping Secrets, Agents, Natural

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• An espionage organization is a collector: it collects raw information. That gets processed by a machinery that is supposed to resolve its reliability, and to present a finished product.

  Aldrich Ames

  Organization, Reliability, Information

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• We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Errors, Wages, Corruption

  "Encouragement of Science". J. Robert Oppenheimer's address at Science Talent Institute (March 6, 1950), as quoted in "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists", Volume 7, No. 1 (pp. 6-8), January 1951.

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• You get so used to lying that after a while it's hard to remember what the truth is.

  Philip Agee

  Lying, Remember, Truth Is

  Inside the Company (1975). Agee has long had that problem.

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• Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Crazy, Opportunity, Spy

  Kurt Vonnegut (2009). “Mother Night: A Novel”, p.191, Dial Press

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• When you grow suspicious of a person and begin a system of espionage upon him, your punishment will be that you will find your suspicions true.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Punishment, Suspicion, Grows

  Elbert Hubbard, Bert Hubbard (1923). “Selected writings of Elbert Hubbard: his mintage of wisdom, coined from a life of love, laughter and work”

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• There are some who become spies for money, or out of vanity and megalomania, or out of ambition, or out of a desire for thrills. But the malady of our time is of those who become spies out of idealism.

  Max Lerner

  Ambition, Vanity, Spy

  Max Lerner (1959). “The unfinished country: a book of American symbols”

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• Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of 'fair play' must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.

  Jimmy Doolittle

  Clever, Philosophy, Play

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• Let's say a Soviet exchange student back in the '70s would go back and tell the KGB about people and places and things that he'd seen and done and been involved with. This is not really espionage; there's no betrayal of trust.

  Aldrich Ames

  Betrayal, Trust No One, Kgb

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• The first rule in keeping secrets is nothing on paper: paper can be lost or stolen or simply inherited by the wrong people; if you really want to keep something secret, don't write it down.

  Thomas Powers

  Writing, Keeping Secrets, People

  The Man Who Kept the Secrets (1979).

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• The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.

  Aldrich Ames

  Effort, Spy, Pertinent

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• My name is E. Howard Hunt. I'm currently retired from more than 22 years in the profession of espionage.

  E. Howard Hunt

  Hunting, Years, Names

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• We have some material on spying by a major government on the tech industry. Industrial espionage.

  Julian Assange

  Technology, Government, Materials

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I found that our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union.

  Aldrich Ames

  Effort, Political, Unions

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• The difficulties of conducting espionage against the Soviet Union in the Soviet Union were such that historically the Agency had backed away from the task.

  Aldrich Ames

  Agency, Tasks, Unions

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• It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.

  John le Carre

  Luck, Here And There, Forget

  The Looking-Glass War (1965). It's not so easy to forget that le Carre's intelligence is, well, fiction.

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

  Anthony Horowitz

  World

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• Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived.

  Ben Macintyre

  War, Party, Deception

  Ben Macintyre (2010). “Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War II”, p.239, A&C Black

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• Once a secret society establishes itself within an open society, there is no end to the hideous mistrust it must cause.

  Rebecca West

  Secret, Causes, Ends

  The New Meaning of Treason (1966). West here was referring to the work of Communists seeking to undermine democracies.

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