France does not practice revenge.
The FBI, to its credit in a self-serving sort of way, rejects the routine use of the polygraph on its own people.
I said in court a long time ago that I didn't see that the Soviet Union was significantly helped by the information I gave them, nor that the United States was significantly harmed.
By the late '70s I had come to question the point of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the CIA's overall charter.
Deciding whether to trust or credit a person is always an uncertain task.
Espionage, for the most part, involves finding a person who knows something or has something that you can induce them secretly to give to you. That almost always involves a betrayal of trust.
Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies.
It's all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.
If it grows, eat it. If it doesn't grow, don't eat it.
If you believe that man is inherently flawed-what religious people call 'original sin'-it follows that man, if left to his own devices, will tend towards ego-driven disharmony. Traditionalist conservatives know that absent the restraining hand of religion, tradition, or the state, there is nothing to prevent human beings from acting in ways contrary to their own best interests, or those of the community.
There’s no freedom quite like the freedom of being constantly underestimated.