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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
"My task is becoming more and more delicate, while the difficulties increase constantly."
"When things go right it's hard to figure out why, but when things go wrong it's really easy."
"The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved."
"A man who dreads trials and difficulties cannot become a revolutionary. If he is to become a revolutionary with an indomitable fighting spirit, he must be tempered in the arduous struggle from his youth. As the saying goes, early training means more than late earning."
"I always anticipated difficulties in order to avoid scenes."
"Conquering any difficulty always gives one a secret joy, for it means pushing back a boundary-line and adding to one's liberty."
"I sometimes suspect that half our difficulties are imaginary and that if we kept quiet about them they would disappear."
"The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future."
"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."
Explore more quotes by Aldrich Ames
"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."
"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."
"There are so many things a large intelligence espionage organization can do to justify its existence, that people can get promotions for, because it could result in results."
"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 use of the polygraph has done little more than create confusion, ambiguity and mistakes."
"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."
"Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies."
"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."
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