Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Espionage. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Espionage Quotes And Sayings by 75 Authors including Dave Mustaine,Stephen Grey,John Updike,John Le Carre,Ally Carter for you to enjoy and share.
Military intelligence, two words combined that cant make sense
Since spies must survive by telling lies, it can be hard to know when they are telling the truth.
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
They would know that inconsistency in human decision can make nonsense of the best-planned espionage approach; that cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a Departmental canteen.
I'm a spy, Cam. I was born to do this- to be this. It's in my blood. And I will do it until the day I die. It's who I am ... The thing is I don't think you realise is ... it's who you are too.
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.
It's critical how we want to use these spy programs, these electronic capabilities, where we want to draw the line, and who should approve these programs, these decisions, and at what level, for engaging in operations that could lead us as a nation into a war.
The world has changed, the CIA is having to change, and again, the challenge for someone like me as a spy novelist is to write realistically about where they're actually going.
No one demands more caution than a spy, and when someone has the skeleton key to minds, counter him by leaving the key of caution inside, on the other side of the keyhole.
If for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.
By definition, intelligence deals with the unclear, the unknown, the deliberately hidden. What the enemies of the United States hope to deny we work to reveal.
...and I was reminded....of the everday boredom of a life in espionage. One is always waiting for someone who does not show up,for something that does not happen.
You could be the perfect spy. All you need is a cause.
Let's say a Soviet exchange student back in the '70s would go back and tell the KGB about people and places and things that he'd seen and done and been involved with. This is not really espionage; there's no betrayal of trust.
Spies go to bars for the same reason people go to libraries: full of information if you know where to ask.
You couldn't trust anyone or anything that belonged to the world of espionage.
I've always loved spy stories. Who can resist?
Our side has agents. Their side has spies.
Collecting secrets was and is crucial to solving foreign policy puzzles.
They [spies] cannot be properly managed without benevolence and straightforwardness.
But first, my friends, I need you to do something for me. We have two spies in the back of the auditorium.
If knowledge is power, clandestine knowledge is power squared; it can be withheld, exchanged, and leveraged.
Science requires us to transform into spies.
Intelligence services exist to do things that are illegal abroad. They exist to tell lies.
Call it what you like, my lady, but it is still spying.
Googling is not spying. It's social networking.
A secret history of the US Government's Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a safe haven in the US for Nazis and their collaborators after WW2 and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.
Life is a struggle and a good spy goes in there and fights.
Trust. We stake our lives on it, but it's a subject that not even the Gallagher Academy can teach. When do you let your guard down? Who do you let in? And I knew at that moment, as I sat beside my mother, bathing in the warm spring light, that those were the questions a good spy never stops asking
You know a lot about spies, espionage, and strategic advantages for a billionaire playboy, real estate mogul, and owner of an exclusive sex club.
I wasn't a spy. I'd have been spotted in five seconds. Yes, I was in intelligence, but that covered a multitude of things.
The NSA's business is 'information dominance,' the use of other people's secrets to shape events.
There is no place where espionage is not possible.
There aren't enough secrets to go round anymore. Some spies are having to invent secrets in order to earn a living.
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
Certain documents, such as the FISA court order allowing collection of telephone records and Obama's presidential directive to prepare offensive cyber-operations, were among the US government's most closely held secrets. Deciphering the archive and the NSA's language
I've been a spy for almost all of my adult life - I don't like being in the spotlight.
The fatal conceit of most spies is to believe they are loved, in a relationship between equals, and not merely manipulated.
Leaking of classified material is a concern.
Agents of disruption, subversion, sabotage and disinformation tunnelers and smugglers, listeners and forgers, trainers and recruiters and talent spotters and couriers and watchers and seducers, assassins and balloonists, lip readers and disguise artists.
I invented the historical spy novel.
If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory, you don't have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works.
I'm a spy ... I worked for the CIA 15 years. The cover was I worked for the insurance business.
I was never a spy. I was with the OSS organization. We had a number of women, but we were all office help.
Ships are blowing up at sea, or catching fire, factories are blowing up. Are these accidents? Are these industrial sabotage? No one really suspected a spy network.
The Secret Teachings on Covert Activity: Even after you infiltrate someone's house, if you cannot know clearly what is going on inside, you should take appropriate measures to understand the situation.
Stasi trained "fraternal" intelligence organizations, such as Cuba's DGI.
Put in the bluntest possible terms, what I discovered was that the U.S. secret intelligence community was collecting only information it considered secret, while ignoring the eighty to ninety percent of the information in the world, in all languages, that was not secret.
I wrote 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself.
Some people think my father was a spy, because of working for that government agency in Vietnam, but he can't find his car keys, much less keep a national secret.
Here's the bottom line: The secret world of intelligence
at least in the United States of America
represents everything wrong with the government, the industrial era, our financial-economic system, and our ethics.
All these years I'd thought being a spy was challenging. Turns out, being a girl is the tricky part.
When you really study espionage movies, or spy movies, the beginnings are really set up to have, like, an amazing bit of action, but at the moment you're watching it, you have no idea why or what it's about.
A person who searched rooms, brandished pistols, dangled promises of half a million franc fees for nameless services and then wrote instructions to Polish spies might reasonably be regarded with suspicion. But suspicion of what?
An intelligence service is the ideal vehicle for a conspiracy.
Slightly embarrassing admission: Even when I was a kid, I used to have these little spy books, and I would, like, see what everybody was doing in my neighborhood and log it down.
Our mobile phones have become the greatest spy on the planet.
Since real spies are so good, you never really know what actual spying is. But I do think spying is a lot more dangerous than we are led to believe.
In the old days, spies had done they'd done because they loved their country, because they believed in what they were doing. But he'd never been given a choice. Nowadays, spies weren't employed. They were used.
The secret of war lies in the communications.
As a beat reporter covering the CIA and intelligence world after the terrorist attacks of 2001, I could sense that many things I couldn't see or understand were changing, expanding, getting so big they were difficult to manage.
We are in this business, whether it be intelligence or the government, to protect freedom, democracy and liberty, not to violate that.
There will always be spies. We have to have them. Without them we wouldn't have got Osama bin Laden - it took us years, but it happened.
I'm not a spy for Russia or China or any other country for that matter.
Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the government. Discovery and invention have made it possible for the government, by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet.
I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.
Find the enemy. Don't let the enemy find you. Reconnaissance! Reconnaissance! Reconnaissance!
I was trained in Army Intelligence, but spent most of my army career in the infantry. But like many people of my generation, I was very much caught up in the Cold War, and books and movies about espionage.
Being a spy was something like standing on the south shore fending off a hurricane with a $2 poncho and an umbrella.
Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.
Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior.
When I served in the Army, along the Iron Curtain we had a word for a person who absconds with information and provides it to another nation: traitor. We also had a name for a person who chooses to reveal secrets he had personally promised to protect: common criminal.
U.S. intelligence services routinely use collection methods against foreigners that foreseeably - with certainty - ingest high volumes of U.S. communications as well.
It is my writing dilemma. The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.
I always liked spy stories.
What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.
While the intelligence profession oftentimes demands secrecy, it is critically important that there be a full and open discourse on intelligence matters with the appropriate elected representatives of the American people.
All the secrets of the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight.
Government is build on secrets.
[T]he whole character of secret Intelligence ... is that nothing should ever be done simply if there are devious ways of doing it.
You can't get closer to the heart of national sovereignty than national security and intelligence services.
The Spy Act strikes a right balance between preserving legitimate and benign uses of this technology, while still, at the same time, protecting unwitting consumers from the harm caused when it is misused and, of course, designed for nefarious purposes.
As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data algorithms they've written to be used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies.
It is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for the purposes of spying, and thereby they achieve great results.
For something that's supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published.
Of all those in the army close to the commander none is more intimate than the secret agent; of all rewards none more liberal than those given to secret agents; of all matters none is more confidential than those relating to secret operations.
Thieves, spies and other wise guys are working everywhere ... including in branches of the U.S. government.
She's always telling us that the worst part of the spy life isn't the danger - it's the paperwork. After all, when you're on a plane home from Istanbul with a nuclear warhead in a hatbox, the last thing you want to do is write a report about it. So
Few secrets can escape an investigator who has opportunityand liceense to undertake such a quest and skill to follow it up.
What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs?
From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it's a big, bureaucratic place. Think 'post office with spies.'
'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion.
Despite the Obama administration's proclaimed commitment to global Internet freedom, the executive branch is not transparent about the types and capabilities of surveillance technologies it is sourcing and purchasing - or about what other governments are purchasing the same technology.
Do you have spies in Clan Heavy?"
"I have spies everywhere."
I looked at Andrea, who was hoarding bacon on her plate.
"She had tea with Mahon's wife." Andrea said.
Aunt B looked at her. "You and I need to work on your air of mystery.
In this effort to attain security, independence and privacy of course were suspect....
There began to appear before my romantic eyes ... a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape.
Curiosity is the beginning and end of secrets.
I have a long-standing interest in what I like to think of as 'forbidden knowledge:' methods of unarmed killing, lock picking, breaking and entry, spy stuff, and other things that the government wants only a few select individuals to know.
Every time the Secretary of Defense tries to get a hand on his many intelligence programs, we hear warnings about the dire consequences to liberty. When you look behind those warnings, what you really see is the CIA trying to preserve its perks.
Spies have the same kinds of needs and desires that everybody does, which is funny. The best kind of comedy derives from that kind of truth.