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"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."
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Exlpore more Difficulty quotes
"Conquering any difficulty always gives one a secret joy, for it means pushing back a boundary-line and adding to one's liberty."
"When things go right it's hard to figure out why, but when things go wrong it's really easy."
"I sometimes suspect that half our difficulties are imaginary and that if we kept quiet about them they would disappear."
"I really worked to try and be creative enough on the guitar parts so those who aren't real educated would know that there was some difficulty in doing it."
"Perpetual pushing and assurance put a difficulty out of countenance and make a seeming difficulty gives way."
"It seems that the greatest difficulty is to find the end. Don't try to find it, it's there already."
"The prudent see only the difficulties, the bold only the advantages, of a great enterprise; the hero sees both; diminishes the former and makes the latter preponderate, and so conquers."
"Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping."
"It is no secret that the Golf Foundation has had its difficulties."
Explore more quotes by Aldrich Ames
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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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