Quotes About Spies

If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

The UFO community?" I said. "Why would government spies want to infiltrate that?" "Oh, Jon," said Steven. "Don't be naive.

The Dar al-Jawasis. The House of Spies.

American presidents come and go, but we spies ensure. – Ari Shamron

But first, my friends, I need you to do something for me. We have two spies in the back of the auditorium.

The Lacedemonians are not wont to ask how many the enemy are, but where they are.

spies and journalists were fated to go through life together, and it was sometimes hard to tell one from the other. Their jobs weren't all that different: they talked to politicians, developed sources in government bureaux, and dug around for secrets.

Female spies typically represented one of two extremes: the seductress who employed her wiles to manipulate men, and the cross-dresser who blended in by impersonating them.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness. Hand that on to your three spies, and tell them to put it in their pipes.

Thanks to all Zafar's precautions, 'Id passed peacefully on 1 August. The British, who were aware through their spies of the growing communal tension, and who had been eagerly hoping for a major communal riot, were disappointed. Hervey Greathed was left merely to grumble in a letter to his wife 'that it is a good satire on the Mahomedans fighting for their faith, that at this Eid, under the Mahomedan king, no one was permitted to sacrifice a cow'.

But Hall was not stopping there. The next stage was for him and Drake to send false reports back, using the names of spies who had actually been arrested – a technique that was perfected in the Second World War – to give the impression that they had uncovered military preparations to invade the German coast in Schleswig-Holstein. The purpose was to force the enemy fleet out to defend their coast.

a "negative correlation," as David Apter put it,55 between coercion and information: that is, while relatively democratic regimes tend to be awash in too much information, as everyone bombards political authorities with explanations and demands, the more authoritarian and repressive a regime, the less reason people have to tell it anything—which is why such regimes are forced to rely so heavily on spies, intelligence agencies, and secret police.

Shaggy existentialists in frayed sandals, dilettantes by the score, spies by the portfolio.

The director of the FBI had been boasting about catching spies he did not really catch. Elizebeth, who did catch them, bragged about her family.

Be subtle. Use your spies for every kind of business. —SUN TZU, The Art of War

Experts say that Britain and France have strong spy agencies; Germany's is competent but afraid to level with its public; the rest are relatively weak, and there is no Europe-wide spy agency.

I think around the world, our agents are the best collectors of information you'll find.

Most spies were amateurs: frustrated revolutionaries of the left or right, people who wanted the imaginary glamour of espionage, greedy men or lovesick women or blackmail victims. The few professionals were very dangerous indeed; they were not merciful men.

Secret intelligence from Berlin was of small value to the conquering Soviets. It was no longer worth the risk. The spies had burned their codebooks and hidden their radio transmitters in the rubble of bombed buildings. They had agreed never to speak of their work. They had been brave, they had shortened the war, and they had saved lives, but it was too much to expect the defeated German people to see things that way. Their courage would remain forever secret.

It is an ambassador's duty to stand up for his nation's foreign policy in any era and under any government whatsoever. Ambassadors are, in the full meaning of the term, titled spies.

I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are.

Moral judgements are singularly out of place in espionage. —Graham Greene

And as every spy knows, common enemies are how allies always begin.