Quotes About Secrecy

I sat down with a yellow legal pad and began writing 'A Time to Kill.' Had no idea what I was doing. It became, over a period of several years, a secret little hobby nobody knew about except my wife, because she was reading chapter by chapter.

Armed drones have become Barack Obama's way to engage in terrorist-infested hellholes without putting 'boots on the ground.' For years, the CIA has been running a secrecy-shrouded program of targeted killings in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, and more recently in Somalia, Syria and Iraq.

Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered.

I wrote a lot about Cheney in 'The New Yorker,' but I wrote very little of what I know. The only time I ever mentioned what he ever said at a meeting was when there were many people there who were not insiders, you know, other people not in the government, so my sources would be protected.

In 2004, Lawrence Wright wrote in the 'New Yorker' about 'The Kingdom of Silence,' where a massive sewer project in Jeddah was really a series of manhole covers across the city with no actual pipes underneath. I, as the editor of a major paper at the time, can say that we all knew - and we never reported on it.

You guys ask really long questions. In the U.S., they just want to know who you're sleeping with.

This is the problem with the leaking. This is actually a terrible thing. Let's say I'm firing Michael Short today. The fact that you guys know about it before he does really upsets me as a human being and as a Roman Catholic.

As a young physician in the mid-'80s, caring for people who had contracted H.I.V., I lost two of my patients to suicide at a time when the virus was doing very little harm to them. I have always thought of them as having been killed by a metaphor, by the burden of secrecy and shame associated with the disease.

I've always believed if a young guy has a chance to play, why would you explain where his weakness is? The only reason would be to help the other team, or to help a gambler.

It was a good 15 or 20 years before anyone at Rand would be in the same room with me. They didn't want the question raised, 'What's your relationship with Daniel Ellsberg?' And not one of them wrote me a letter because they didn't want a letter of theirs to show up in my trash - which the FBI had been going through.

My anonymity is something I treasure.

I treasure my privacy.

In the beginning, the U.S. government was happy with its secret operations, since it thought it had managed to gather all the evils of the world in GTMO, and had circumvented U.S. law and international treaties so that it could perform its revenge. But then it realised, after a lot of painful work, that it had gathered a bunch of non-combatants.

Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them.

In 1907, Britain and Russia signed a treaty dividing Iran between them; no Iranian was at the negotiations or even knew they were taking place.

Growing up as a kid, I wanted to be a ninja. In martial arts, even though I did Chinese kung fu, I always wanted to be this secret samurai or a ninja. There's something about ninjas that was very appealing to me as a kid. So of course, I was climbing a lot of trees and other things and getting up to mischief - good mischief.

This persistence as private firms continued because it ensured the maximum of anonymity and secrecy to persons of tremendous public power who dreaded public knowledge of their activities as an evil almost as great as inflation.

We have made tremendous progress. But there are still too many kids in our country who grow up feeling like they have to hold on to this secret about who they are because, if anyone finds out it, could cost them everything.

When people say, 'Why don't you face the music?' I say, 'You have to understand the music is not an open court and a fair trial.'

I began to fear that I was forever going to be living in a hot desert cage, living as and being treated as a male, disappearing from the world into a secret prison, and never facing a public trial.

The power of the sin is in its secrecy. Rip the covers off!

I thought if I told no one it might not be true.

That's the first rule of survival in enemy waters: volunteer nothing.

Complete honesty is not the same thing as full disclosure.