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"When Reagan was elected, I felt that the Agency had gone much more into the service of a political tendency in the country with which I had already felt very strong disagreement."
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"What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds."
"America is the most fertile ground of opportunity."
"This country and the Commonwealth last Tuesday were not far from the Kingdom of Heaven."
"In the city a funeral is just an interruption of traffic; in the country it is a form of popular entertainment."
"To be able to detect the outbreak of avian flu anywhere in the world is going to require a partnership of several countries that will share information and samples, but it is important to remember a threat anywhere is a threat everywhere."
"We are a country of excess. So it's not the violence, per se, but the exacerbation and constant repetition."
"This country is undergoing great changes for the better."
"If you can sell green toothpaste in this country, you can sell opera."
Explore more quotes by Aldrich Ames
"I knew quite well, when I gave the names of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law, and then prosecution and capital punishment."
"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."
"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."
"The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent."
"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."
"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."
"Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies."
"Because interrogations are intended to coerce confessions, interrogators feel themselves justified in using their coercive means. Consistency regarding the technique is not important; inducing anxiety and fear is the point."
"In my professional work with the Agency, by the late '70s, I had come to question the value of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the intelligence agency's impact on American policy."
"When I got the money, the whole burden descended on me, and the realization of what I had done. And it led me then to make the further step, a change of loyalties."
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