top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Idea quotes
"From the port of ideas, not only the most clever ones put out to sea and conquer the world but also the most stupid ones do this!"
"Through your ideas, you open the window of your mind and say a hello to the world."
"Unless you close your door to other ideas, you will never remain idealess!"
"Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads."
"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism."
"Give people films, they will forget after a few weeks, but give people ideas, they will assimilate them into their consciousness."
"In the jungle of ideas, it is hard to find the true direction! The paths of the wrong ideas often seem to be very alluring!"
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."
"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."
"The resistance of policy-makers to intelligence is not just founded on an ideological presupposition. They distrust intelligence sources and intelligence officials because they don't understand what the real problems are."
"We had periodic crises in this country when the technical intelligence didn't support the policy. We had the bomber gap, the missile gap."
"I could have stopped it after they paid me the $50,000. I wouldn't even have had to go on to do more than I already had: just the double agents' names that I gave."
"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."
bottom of page