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"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."
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"Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation" the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true."
"Adults who use big words in order to seem intelligent are annoying, especially those who are not intelligent."
"Smartness without wisdom is stupidity."
"Every intelligent being, whether it breathes or not, coughs nervously at some time in its life."
"A researcher that has a brain that functions differently from their peers is at an advantage, as they can see things that the others cannot."
"Your complete intelligence is designed to experience the fullness of life, not a narrow omission of its best possibilities."
"Emotionally intelligent people can focus their emotions to improve performance and productivity."
"Most unintelligent or foolish people do not regard themselves as that, they regard themselves as not-that-intelligent or not-that-wise."
"None of us is born a genius, it self-ignites within us."
"Once intelligent beings achieve technology and the capacity for self-destruction of their species, the selective advantage of intelligence becomes more uncertain."
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"The Soviet Union did not achieve victory over the West, so was my information inadequate to help them to victory, or did it play no particular role in their failure to achieve victory?"
"Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies."
"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 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."
"When I handed over the names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union, I had come to the conclusion that the loss of these sources to the U.S. would not compromise significant national defense, political, diplomatic interests."
"The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent."
"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."
"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."
"The FBI, to its credit in a self-serving sort of way, rejects the routine use of the polygraph on its own people."
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