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"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."
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"Create a good idea and leave it in the darkness; you will then see that people will come with the candles in their hands to find it, because just like the bad, the good has also a special scent!"

"If somebody came up with a really good idea, everyone would back it. Especially when we did the show, we had a real dedication that, if you were in somebody else's scene, everyone worked their hardest to make that scene good."

"Unless you close your door to other ideas, you will never remain idealess!"

"Ideas are the invisible Gods of our universe!"

"An idea can change your fate in a wonderful way but you must first let the idea to touch your mind and your heart! No closed book can ever be your hero!"

"So, I was just a young guy, maybe with an idea, and Cecil Taylor, himself a rebel, would take a chance on a guy like me. It turned out to be a very symbiotic partnership. I learned a lot from him."
Explore more quotes by Aldrich Ames

"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."

"Our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies."

"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."

"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."

"We had periodic crises in this country when the technical intelligence didn't support the policy. We had the bomber gap, the missile gap."
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