Spy Quotes - Page 2

• I got nothing. Even the spies I'm spying on who are spying on other spies got nothing.

  Kresley Cole

  Kresley Cole (2012). “Shadow's Claim: Immortals After Dark: The Dacians”, p.252, Simon and Schuster

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• Spy' is such a short ugly word. I prefer 'espionage.' Those extra three syllables really say something.

  Howard Tayler

  Three, Ugly, Espionage

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• Writers are spies. Outsiders. Believers in the turning pages.

  Alexis De Veaux

  Pages, Outsiders, Believer

  Alexis De Veaux (1974). “Spirits in the street”

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• The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.

  Mata Hari

  Love, Dance, Art

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• The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons, particularly to people who have been in warfare, who have been bombed and shelled for at the back of a bombing run is invariably a photograph. In the back of ruined towns, and cities, and factories, there is aerial mapping, or spy mapping, usually with a camera. Therefore the camera is a feared instrument, and a man with a camera is suspected and watched wherever he goes... In the minds of most people today the camera is the forerunner of destruction, and it is suspected, and rightly so.

  John Steinbeck

  Running, Men, Cities

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• 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.

  Baltasar Gracian

  Skeletons, Keys, Leaving

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• 

  I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.

  Nathan Hale

  Inspirational, Life, Country

  Before being executed as a spy by the British, 22 September 1776, in Henry Phelps Johnston 'Nathan Hale, 1776' (1914) ch. 7.

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• Most of us live in a condition of secrecy: secret desires, secret appetites, secret hatreds and relationship with the institutions which is extremely intense and uncomfortable. These are, to me, a part of the ordinary human condition. So I don't think I'm writing about abnormal things. ... Artists, in my experience, have very little center. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.

  John le Carre

  Real, Writing, Artist

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• By encouraging men to spy and report on one another, by making it in the private interest of large numbers of citizens to evade the controls, and by making actions illegal that are in the public interest, the controls undermine individual morality.

  Milton Friedman

  Men, Numbers, Individual Morality

  Milton Friedman (1972). “An economist's protest: columns in political economy”

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• 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.

  John le Carre

  Thinking, Cowboy, Play

  The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). Sounds like some writers.

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• How can it be a spy satellite if they announce on television that it's a spy satellite?

  George Carlin

  Television, Satellites, Ifs

  George Carlin (2002). “Napalm & Silly Putty”, Hyperion

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• But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or the spy.

  John le Carre

  Real, Lying, Thinking

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• Of the tyrant, spies and informers are the principal instruments. War is his favorite occupation, for the sake of engrossing the attention of the people, and making himself necessary to them as their leader.

  Aristotle

  War, Tyrants, People

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• Tyrants preserve themselves by sowing fear and mistrust among the citizens by means of spies, by distracting them with foreign wars, by eliminating men of spirit who might lead a revolution, by humbling the people, and making them incapable of decisive action.

  Aristotle

  War, Mean, Men

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• No grand inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest; nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared as anxiety knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused, as anxiety does, which never lets him escape.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Men, Judging, Anxiety

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• I think my love for books sprang from my need to escape the world I was born into, to slide into another where words were straightforward and honest, where there was clearly delineated good and evil, where I found girls who were strong and smart and creative and foolish enough to fight dragons, to run away from home to live in museums, to become child spies, to make new friends and build secret gardens.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Girl, Running, Strong

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• The United States has faced threats from criminal groups, from terrorists, from spies throughout our history, and we have limited our responses. We haven't resorted to total war every time we have a conflict around the world, because that restraint is what defines us. That restraint is what gives us the moral standing to lead the world.

  Edward Snowden

  War, Giving, Criminals

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Turns out, you can take the girl out of the spy school, but you can never take the spy school out of the girl.

  Ally Carter

  Girl, School, Turns

  "United We Spy". Book by Ally Carter, September 5, 2013.

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• Yet have I ever heard it said that spies and tale-bearers have done more mischief in this world than poisoned bowl or the assassin's dagger.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Done, World, Assassins

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• Today's difference between Russia and the United States is that in Russia everybody takes everybody else for a spy, and in the United States everybody takes everybody else for a criminal.

  Friedrich Durrenmatt

  Russia, Differences, Criminals

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• The enemy's spies who have come to spy on us must be sought out, tempted with bribes, led away and comfortably housed. Thus they will become double agents and available for our service. It is through the information brought by the double agent that we are able to acquire and employ local and inward spies. It is owing to his information, again, that we can cause the doomed spy to carry false tidings to the enemy.

  Sun Tzu

  Art, Military, War

  Sun Tzu, Niccolo Machiavelli (2013). “The Complete Art of War”, p.69, Simon and Schuster

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• I am on Facebook, but mainly as a way to spy on my children. I find out more about them from their Facebook pages than from what they tell me.

  Salman Rushdie

  Children, Pages, Way

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• I've always wanted to play a spy, because it is the ultimate acting exercise. You are never what you seem.

  Benedict Cumberbatch

  Exercise, Play, Acting

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• I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are.

  William Tecumseh Sherman

  Hate, Civil War, Rumor

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• For the good are always the merry, / Save by an evil chance,/ And the merry love the fiddle,/ And the merry love to dance: / And when the folk there spy me,/ They will all come up to me, / With,”Here is the fiddler of Dooney!” / And dance like a wave of the sea.

  William Butler Yeats

  Sea, Evil, Chance

  William Butler Yeats, Colton Johnson (2000). “The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol X: Later Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles, Reviews, and Radio Broadcasts Written After 1900”, p.225, Simon and Schuster

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