Quotes from Jason Fagone

Lindbergh became the public face and champion of an antiwar group called the America First Committee. "America First," a campaign slogan of Woodrow Wilson, had been adopted by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

To those who had a chance to watch them both work, the minds of William and Elizebeth appeared equally amazing and equally incomprehensible. Their brains were Easter Island statues, stony and imposing.

It was more important to be honest. "We glide over the offensiveness of names and calm down our consciences by eulogistic mellifluous terms, until our very moral senses are dulled," she wrote. "Let things be shown, let them come forth in their real colors, and humanity will not be so prone to a sin which is glossed over by a dainty public!

His nervous collapse was an "anxiety reaction" sparked by "prolonged overwork

The wild success of the "Ducase" had two large and lasting effects on America. The first was that it discouraged future Nazi attempts at spying within the borders of the United States. The second was that it made J. Edgar Hoover a legend.

Today a car is probably the most highly regulated product you can buy outside of a prescription drug, its every nook and cranny shaped by seemingly endless lines of federal code.)

One historian has called TICOM, short for Target Intelligence Committee, "the last great secret of World War II.

one condition: that she be allowed to work from home.

We glide over the offensiveness of names and calm down our consciences by eulogistic mellifluous terms, until our very moral senses are dulled," she wrote. "Let things be shown, let them come forth in their real colors, and humanity will not be so prone to a sin which is glossed over by a dainty public!

William concluded that Germany had never lost faith in the security of the Enigma machine. They thought Enigma was unbreakable all the way to the end. He was proud to learn that Nazi codebreakers had never managed to defeat America's best cipher machine, the SIGABA, which he had invented with Frank Rowlett.

people valued politeness more than truth

For all the harmless innocence conjured by the word library, the Friedmans knew the truth: a library, properly maintained, could save the world - or burn it down.

Truth was truth and anything else was fuckery.

It's not quite true that history is written by the winners. It's written by the best publicists on the winning team.

One way of thinking about science is that it's a check against the natural human tendency to see patterns that might not be there. It's a way of knowing when a pattern is real and when it's a trick of your mind.

It made them feel, as all good books do, less alone.

So this is where the CIA began—with J. Edgar Hoover telling the British to go to hell, and the British not appreciating it.

the measure of a person was her ideas

making yourself understood to another person is essentially a problem of cryptology.

Nikola Tesla predicted in 1926 that "when wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain

No code is ever completely solved, you know. —ELIZEBETH S. FRIEDMAN

Before the coast guard sent the FBI a decrypt, the coast guard clerks typed "SIS Dupe" at the bottom of the sheet, beneath the line that said "CG Translation" and "CG Decryption." These once-secret files, located in the National Archives and finally declassified in 2000, prove that the coast guard, not the FBI, solved these Nazi radio circuits.

The president of Harvard changed admissions rules to keep Jews out

A library, properly maintained, could save the world, or burn it down.