Quotes About Secrecy

I had to read up on the Freemasons, about secret societies, and dip my toe into art history.

I didn't want to be known. People say, 'I didn't want to toil in obscurity.' I like toiling in obscurity.

Well that's true, and what is actually happening now is that there are accusations that those records contain conspiratorial information that has been concealed from the American people and that is a dangerous situation that just cannot be tolerated.

There is the crime and there is silence.

One doesn't like to appear vulgarly inquisitive. But if everyone one knows has suddenly started murdering everyone else, it would be terribly nice to know about it.

Members of today's kleptocratic networks who incorporate companies under fictitious or borrowed names are using a modern screening allegory on law enforcement and the public. Only initiates learn where the money comes from, how much there really is, and how much is being stolen from fellow citizens in the form of unpaid taxes. One entity has been particularly effective in its use of secrecy: the Koch network.

If these men wished to influence ideas and public policies, why the secrecy? Isn't that what people do in a democracy? In a 1997 speech, Charles Koch provided an answer: "We are greatly outnumbered." Meaning, most Americans don't want what they want. Democracy can't work for them.

The group within the cloak of secrecy is superior to the rest. Those not eligible for initiation are at best inferiors. They may be the enemy.

What was once the language of secrecy is now the language of power.

Watching me, judging me, smelling the crippling failure oozing from my skin, my desperation clawing and all-consuming panic drenching me as I gape in horror at the world and wonder why everyone is smiling and looking at me with secret knowledge of my aching shame.

Some people wore their difference honestly, but my parents were liars, illegitimate Waitsfielders, their off-whiteness discovered only after the paint had dried. By the time I was born, the house had faded to the color of dirty snow.

There is a terrible weight to that never from Malkar Gennadion, who is also Brinvillier Strych-and who knows how many other names he may have had? Who knows how many lives he may have held and used and discarded, how many other lives he may have left ruined in his wake? I wonder if even Malkar himself knows any longer.

Do most gay women love each other?" Doc asked. "A lot of them love closeted movie stars.

She said that; and I knew then that, careful as I have been—still and secret and silent as I have been, in my high room—she has been watching me, as Miss Ridley watches, and Miss Haxby.

I knew about that kind of love. I knew how it was to bare your palpitating heart, and be fearful as you did so that the beats should come too loudly, and betray you. I had kept my heart-beats smothered; and had been betrayed, anyway.

We fitted together like the two halves of an oyster-shell. I was Narcissus, embracing the pond in which I was about to drown. However much we had to hide our love, however guarded we had to be about our pleasure, I could not long be miserable about a thing so very sweet. Nor, in my gladness, could I quite believe that anybody would be anything but happy for me if only they knew.

Si mi madre hubiera estado aquí, les habría dicho de entrada que somos ateos. Pero en esto, mi padre se parece a mí; si no es preciso, de ciertas cosas preferimos no hablar".

Sometimes it's not good for people to find out who you really are.

Why are you talking? Who gave you permission to talk?' Vaughn demanded. 'In circumstances like this, we close ranks. Never complain, never explain, right?

occasionally I can be quite evil, when there's no-one around to realise.

Max always mumbles; not in a shy way, but rather as if he's telling you what it will cost to take out your worst enemy, or how much you'd have to pay to rig a horse race.

To the degree that the British right hand didn't know what the left was doing, it was because a select group of men at the highest reaches of its government went to great lengths to ensure it. To that end, they created a labyrinth of information firewalls—deceptions, in a less charitable assessment—to make sure that crucial knowledge was withheld from Britain's wartime allies and even from many of her own seniormost diplomats and military commanders.

In recounting the saga of Sasha Orlov, Peter Sichel gave a weary sigh. "It was a classic example of case officers falling in love with their agents. I tried to tell them they were being played. Unfortunately, in this case they refused to listen." But of course, everything in the intelligence shadow world can be interpreted from at least two different angles, because everything has the potential of being the precise opposite of what it first appears.

there was just one person in the world who knew the full details of both the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence and the emerging Sykes-Picot compact, and who might have grasped the extent to which Arab, French, and British goals in the region had now been set on a collision course: Mark Sykes.