Ben Macintyre Quotes

• Libraries are not just for reading in, but for sociable thinking, exploring, exchanging ideas and falling in love. They were never silent. Technology will not change that, for even in the starchiest heyday of Victorian self-improvement, libraries were intended to be meeting places of the mind, recreational as well as educational.

  Ben Macintyre

  Falling In Love, Educational, Reading

  6 Copy quote

• I love telling stories, and am almost entirely unable to keep a secret.

  Ben Macintyre

  Secret, Stories, Telling Stories

  4 Copy quote

• The Man Who Never Was,' by Ewen Montagu, remains the best book about wartime espionage written by an active participant - incomplete, and dry in parts, it nonetheless summons up the ingenuity and sheer eccentricity of those who played this strange and dangerous game.

  Ben Macintyre

  Book, Men, Games

  4 Copy quote

• The broad outlines of the Double Cross deception have been known since 1972, when Sir John Masterman, the former chairman of the double agent committee, controversially published his account of the operation in defiance of official secrecy.

  Ben Macintyre

  Deception, Agents, Secrecy

  4 Copy quote

• What if?' history is a tricky game, but there is no doubt that the senior planners of D-Day - including Eisenhower and the British general Bernard Montgomery - believed that the Double Cross operation had played a pivotal role in the victory.

  Ben Macintyre

  Senior, Games, What If

  4 Copy quote

• Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived.

  Ben Macintyre

  War, Party, Deception

  Ben Macintyre (2010). “Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War II”, p.239, A&C Black

  9 Copy quote

• If you put into one room everyone who considered themselves a Nietzschean, there would be a bloodbath.

  Ben Macintyre

  Would Be, Rooms, Ifs

  Ben Macintyre (2013). “Forgotten Fatherland: The search for Elisabeth Nietzsche”, p.18, A&C Black

  4 Copy quote

• To disarm while being best armed, out of an elevation of sensibility-that is the means to real peace.

  Ben Macintyre

  Real, Mean, Elevation

  Ben Macintyre (2013). “Forgotten Fatherland: The search for Elisabeth Nietzsche”, p.195, A&C Black

  4 Copy quote

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