Quotes About Secrecy

Peter Levenda

There is a remarkably distinctive smell emitted by fearful bureaucrats. It is acrid, rank, and seems to cling to the clothing and the hair. Acting like a pheromone, it drives senior management to form small defensive herds from which to scream homicidally at middle management that they must not tell junior staff who can fix the problem what is going on because everything, including what has just been reported on the radio, is secret.

One is bound to one's wife, but has a bond to one's mistress.

He is a fool that cannot conceal his wisdom." - Benjamin Franklin.

You might hold an ethical position that it's wrong to lie, but if you have plans for a war in Iraq, and you want to keep them secret for practical reasons - to reduce casualties, perhaps - and someone asks you about those plans, you may need to lie for a 'good' outcome.

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

The math was irrefutable: The one winning strategy was concealment. Only fools revealed their birthdays.

Only fools revealed their birthdays.

A secret lab is considered by many to be the physical manifestation of a spark's mind. Thus they tend to be rather individualistic. Some are spotlessly clean; some are filled with dangerous trash. Some are ruthlessly efficient; some are filled with suicidal deathtraps. Needless to say, sparks are usually vocally dismissive of the labs of others, while surreptitiously making notes about things they'd wished they'd thought of themselves.

The only way to Cuba is with the CIA.

The soldier talks, guardedly, as some soldiers do,

to no one did he bare his soul so utterly

Serial killers very rarely, if ever, let people into their confidence. Murder is their secret and they guard it carefully. This is one of several reasons police agencies have difficulty apprehending serial murderers: they keep their mouths shut about who they really are, and after the truth does come out everyone is always shocked.

If all the fish in the sea kept their mouths shut, they'd never get caught" is an often repeated mantra in the world of organized crime.

He'd first make sure the guests were asleep by listening at the window. When he was satisfied, he'd open the door, enter quickly, get down to the ground, and wait, making certain the guests weren't disturbed. Then he'd crawl across the floor, as Mike had taught him, and find the wallets, cash, and watches using a penlight to see.

People not used to the world … are unskillful enough to show what they have sense enough not to tell.

William Leonard Courtney (then sixty-one-year-old theatre and literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, he had been an Oxford professor of philosophy until forced to resign when his homosexuality became public knowledge)

Until the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, the committees were shrouded in secrecy. No details were given about them:

They are afraid. They would, today, keep secret a thousand things that, yesterday, they would have told one another freely. Freedom. Where is it now? We are driving it into limbo—their kind. To limbo.

In any case, I like to repeat his name to myself in secret. I like to write it on scraps of paper. I am stupidly sentimental: that hasn't changed much.

El anciano se llama Linh. Es el único que lo sabe, porque el resto de las personas que lo sabían están muertas.

There are three different ways to cross out a misspelled word: with a straight line, a squiggly one, or by scratching out the word with your pencil so many times that it ends up looking like top-secret, heavily redacted, highly classified material that must never be found out or else you will be killed.

green trench coat so that it hid brown hair that reached

The Enemy, who wears her mother's usual face and confidential tone, has access; doubtless stares into her writing case and listens on the phone.