T. B. Aldrich Quotes

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.

The betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo.

The use of the polygraph has done little more than create confusion, ambiguity and mistakes.

The U.S. is, so far as I know, the only nation which places such extensive reliance on the polygraph. It has gotten us into a lot of trouble.

The FBI, to its credit in a self-serving sort of way, rejects the routine use of the polygraph on its own people.

Perhaps my information hurt the Soviet Union more than it helped. I have no idea. It was not something I ever discussed with the KGB officers that I was dealing with.

I saw a limit to what I was giving as kind of a scam I was running on the KGB, by giving them people that I knew were their double agents fed to us.

The only thing I ever withheld from the KGB were the names of two agents whom I personally had known and handled and had a particular feeling for.

The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.

Regardless of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which lies close to your heart.

A man is known by the company his mind keeps.

Christmas Eve was a night of song that wrapped itself about you like a shawl. But it warmed more than your body. It warmed your heart...filled it, too, with melody that would last forever.

An espionage organization is a collector: it collects raw information. That gets processed by a machinery that is supposed to resolve its reliability, and to present a finished product.

The difficulties of conducting espionage against the Soviet Union in the Soviet Union were such that historically the Agency had backed away from the task.

All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do sowould I?

I found that our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union.

What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.

I came into the Agency with a set of ideas and attitudes that were quite typical of people coming into the Agency at that time. You could call it liberal anti-communism.

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.

I handed over names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union.

They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation.

But I, in the chilling twilight stand and wait At the portcullis, at thy castle gate, Longing to see the charmed door of dreams Turn on its noiseless hinges, delicate sleep!

The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.

Come watch with me the shaft of fire that glows in yonder West; the fair, frail palaces, The fading Alps and archipelagoes and great cloud continents of sunset-seas.

Love is the light that you see by.

There is no division nor subtraction in the heart-arithmetic of a good mother. There are only addition and multiplication.

A person may encircle the globe with mind open only to bodily comfort. Another may live his life on a sixty-foot lot and listen to the voices of the universe.

What probing deep Has ever solved the mystery of sleep?

Before passage of this [Federal Reserve] Act, the New York Bankers could only dominate the reserves of New York. Now, we are able to dominate the bank reserves of the entire country.

Our souls may all be equal in the sight of the Lord, but our gumption and ingenuity ain't. So the results of man's labor will never be equal.

It was true, she thought, that the big things awe us but the little things touch us.

To the extent that I considered the personal burden of harming the people who had trusted me, plus the Agency, or the United States, I wasn't processing that.

It takes a small town to keep you humble.

I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings.

I bought the sweetness with this pain.

You might as well ask why a middle-aged man with no criminal record might put a paper bag over his head and rob a bank. I acted out of personal desperation.

Historians don't really like to carry on speculative debates, but you could certainly argue that the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was extremely, extremely low.

If all be true that I do think, There are five reasons we should drink: Good wine - a friend - or being dry - Or lest we should be by and by - Or any other reason why.

Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs -- putting in his oar, so to speak -- with some pat word or sentence.

The national security state has many unfair and cruel weapons in its arsenal, but that of junk science is one which can be fought and perhaps defeated.

not all clever words are true. ... And inversely most things that are true are not clever.

With the tears a Land hath shed. Their graves should ever be green.

Gracious to all, to none subservient, Without offense he spoke the word he meant

Sometime in their lives, everybody wanted to go home.

Great thoughts in crude, unshapely verse set forth lose half their preciousness, and ever must, unless the diamond with its own rich dust be cut and polished, it seems little worth.

What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.

How fugitive and brief is mortal life between the budding and the falling leaf.

After a debauch of thunder-shower, the weather takes the pledge and signs it with a rainbow.