Quotes About Secrecy

turn all the mirrors to the wall.

All the criminals do their work on the screen, which people can see. Politicians work behind the screen, which the public can't see.1 —Gang leader Chotta Shakeel, in Suketu Mehta, Maximum City

You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

Off-camera lives are unverifiable.

You understand it's not a matter of strategy. I'm not talking about secrets or deceptions. I'm talking about being yourself. If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

We commit our crimes at night and reveal ourselves in the high noon of studio lights.

Ample women do not plan such things. They lack the guile for conspiracies of the body.

Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowledge, wrote it painstakingly down. These systems collect and process. All the secret knowledge of the world.

Te lo ricordi com'era, sudare sotto le coperte, da bambini? La febbre è una cosa segreta. È come cadere in un buco dove nessuno può seguirti, ma non provi né paura né dolore perché non ti senti neanche te stesso. Io adoro raggomitolarmi nel sudore.

She used to say to him, If people knew what I was thinking they would put me away forever. But they would put us all away, he said. They have put us away. we are put away for our thoughts, one way or another. We have put ourselves away, he said.

Everyone was a spook or dupe or asset, a double, courier, cutout or defector, or was related to one. We were all linked in a vast and rhythmic coincidence, a daisy chain of rumor, suspicion and secret wish.

The dangerous secrets used to be held outside the government. Plots, conspiracies, secrets of revolution, secrets of the end of the social order. Now it's the government that has a lock on the secrets that matter. All the danger is in the White House, from nuclear weapons on down.

What do you think the afterlife is, a body of facts just waiting to be uncovered? Do you think the U.S. Air Force is secretly gathering data on the afterlife and keeping it under wraps because we're not mature enough to accept the findings? The findings would cause a panic? No. I'll tell you what the afterlife is. it's a sweet and terribly touching idea. You can take it or leave it.

Abbiamo bisogno di sapere cose che gli altri non sanno. È quello che nessuno sa di te che ti permette di conoscerti.

He heard a page turning beside him: Paola obviously had kept some text secreted about her person or under the cushion where she sat, left there in the event that life presented her with the necessity of spending three minutes with nothing to read.

He hesitated, himself offended by the next question he had to put to her. He told himself that he was like a priest, a doctor, and that what people told him went no further, but he knew that wasn't true, knew that he would respect no confidence if it would lead him to find the person he was looking for.

conoscienze: acquaintances, friendships, contacts and debts built up over a lifetime of dealing with a system generally agreed, even by those in its employ, perhaps especially by those in its employ, to be inefficient to the point of uselessness, prone to the abuses resultant from centuries of bribery, and encumbered by a Byzantine instinct for secrecy and lethargy.

At times Brunetti thought Italy was a country where everyone knew everything while no one was willing to say anything. In private, everyone was eager to comment with absolute certainty on the secret doings of politicians, Mafia leaders, movie stars; put them into a situation where their remarks might have legal consequences, and Italy turned into the largest clam bed in the world.

Unsettled heart. The fetishism of secrecy. These people understood—as I did—the back alleys of the soul, whispers and shadows, money slipping from hand to hand, the password, the code, the second self, all the hidden consolations that lifted

Even if life is great--keep it to yourself. You don't want to tempt the devil.

I was jarred - a little spooked as well - at so blatant a reference to something referred to, by mutual agreement, almost exclusively with codes, catchwords, a hundred different euphemisms. It was the most important night of my life, he said calmly. It enabled me to do what I've always wanted most. Which is? To live without thinking.

I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from all humankind until the very end:

Then why aren't you happy?" "I don't want to talk about it." "And

Fear puts an end to openness; fear leads to secrecy; fear sows the seed of much hypocrisy and leads to many lies.