Top 100 Spy Quotes
#1. Before he can become a wolf, the lycanthrope strips naked. If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you.
Angela Carter
#2. Do you really want to know what it's like, being a spy? Never sure to whom you're giving your allegiance, and knowing that most of your colleagues will die gruesomely, often by your hand? Fine. Let me show you.
Delilah S. Dawson
#3. In other men we faults can spy,/ And blame the mote that dims their eye;/ Each little speck and blemish find;/ To our own stronger errors blind.
Benjamin Franklin
#4. I used to think, 'I'm going to write.' I knew that from quite early on, but I also thought, 'Maybe I'll be an explorer or a spy,' and it all came from books.
Lisa Tuttle
#5. I'll tell you what I really enjoy. We all go to the movies, we all watch television, we know what they're about, how they work. When the main character is a cop or a spy, it's very exciting, but I also very much enjoy when the main characters are nobodies - a trucker.
Nathan Fillion
#6. We bribe the Guild with a monstrous payment in spice to keep our skies clear of satellites and such that none may spy what we do to the face of Arrakis. She
Frank Herbert
#7. Family is what could motivate a man to knowingly house a spy. it could give him the fortitude to look her in the eye and pretend he cared.
T.A. Maclagan
#8. Christ, was he going to die in public, in a pleasure garden, in the company of a sodomite spy dressed like a rooster?
Diana Gabaldon
#9. Love is a spy who is plotting treason, In league with that warm, red rebel, the Heart.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
#10. I probably read Harriet the Spy about 70,000 times.
Alison Bechdel
#11. Usually people look at you when they're talking to you. I know that they're working out what I'm thinking, but I can't tell what they're thinking. It is like being in a room with a one-way mirror in a spy film.
Mark Haddon
#12. What I find interesting about Captain Action is that he is more an adventurer and spy than he is a soldier.
Chris Roberson
#13. Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?
Alan Furst
#14. When I was growing up, I dreamed about becoming a cowgirl, a detective, a spy, a great actress, or a ballerina. Not a dentist, like my father, or a homemaker, like my mother - and certainly not a writer, although I always loved to read.
Judy Blume
#15. Do I want to know why you're so informed about spyware?" she asked.
Nikolaos gave her a charming, dazzling smile. "No, my dear. You do not.
Molly Ringle
#16. What I want is for people to really grab hold of language and not be nervous about it. 'The Word Spy' is all about diving in and playing with words.
Ursula Dubosarsky
#17. Spy (1973)
Many years ago,
I was sent
to spy out the land beyond the age of thirty.
And I stayed there
and didn't go back to my senders,
so as not to be made
to tell
about this land
and made
to lie.
Yehuda Amichai
#18. There are some who become spies for money, or out of vanity and megalomania, or out of ambition, or out of a desire for thrills. But the malady of our time is of those who become spies out of idealism.
Max Lerner
#19. Maybe it's the spy novelist in me looking for a future plot, but I hope the U.S. and its allies are thinking how to operate 'unconventionally' in Iraq and Syria in ways that undermine the Islamic State.
David Ignatius
#20. It is an ambassador's duty to stand up for his nation's foreign policy in any era and under any government whatsoever. Ambassadors are, in the full meaning of the term, titled spies.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#21. In part, it's so difficult to come up with something original, to come up with a character nowadays. If you created a globetrotting adventurer, he'd be compared to Indiana Jones. If you created a super spy, he'd be compared to James Bond.
Marc Guggenheim
#22. That cat was a spy. You had to take a pot shot at it. It was a very clever German midget dressed up in a cheap fur coat.
J.D. Salinger
#23. Some people think my father was a spy, because of working for that government agency in Vietnam, but he can't find his car keys, much less keep a national secret.
Lauren Graham
#24. If there's no sea-gull there's no meeting, Wicklow had said. No sea-gull means abort. That's my epitaph, thought Barley. 'There was no sea-gull, so he aborted.
John Le Carre
#25. Pain seared through me again-a hot, burning stab in my gut-and yet my body found strength I didn't know I had, correcting as I fell.
Ally Carter
#26. When you really study espionage movies, or spy movies, the beginnings are really set up to have, like, an amazing bit of action, but at the moment you're watching it, you have no idea why or what it's about.
John Lasseter
#27. For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.
John Le Carre
#29. I don't understand hate. I've seen its power. I've known its wrath. I've even felt it coursing through my veins, pushing me on. But I don't know where it comes from or why it lasts, how it can take hold in some people and grow.
Ally Carter
#30. A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life
Honore De Balzac
#31. Protestantism has actually put a man in the position of a country governed by secret police. The spy and eavesdropper, 'conscience,' watches over every motion of the mind, and all thought and action is for it a 'matter of conscience,' i.e. police business.
Max Stirner
#32. You say kidnap. We say hold in a secure facility until it's safe to turn you over to the proper authorities," Bex replied with a grin. "But to each his own.
Ally Carter
#33. My father was sleepless most of his life. So by the age of five, I was awake with him all night long, watching bad television or we'd lie in the same bed, and I'd read my comic books while he read his latest spy or mystery novel.
Sherman Alexie
#34. Some men will never be heroes, some heroes will never be men, he thought, with urgent acknowledgements to Joseph Conrad.
John Le Carre
#35. It was time for the mirror pep talk.
"Okay, Maggie," I said to myself after my shower, wiping the steam off the medicine cabinet.
"You could eat these kids for breakfast. You won't, though, because that would be cannibalistic and
wrong.
Robin Benway
#36. He always wants to expand every one's rights: illegal aliens, terrorists, Russian spies, except American citizens.
Rush Limbaugh
#37. The American Communist Party was notoriously infiltrated by informers, some working for the FBI, some for capitalist employers. At one time it used to be said that spies practically kept the Party going with their dues and contributions.
Helen Lawrenson
#38. The denials, if they need be given, could better be given with sincerity, and they could only be feigned if you didn't know them at all.
Kenneth Eade
#39. Kiril sat up and raked a hand through his hair. In the light of dawn, Shara was still on his mind. She was a Dark, a spy sent to monitor a spy.
Donna Grant
#40. The trouble is, when professional spies go out of their way to make a definitive statement about one of their own, the public tends to believe the opposite: which puts us all back where we started.
John Le Carre
#41. I'm a holy man minus the holiness. Hand that on to your three spies, and tell them to put it in their pipes.
E. M. Forster
#42. According to The Washington Post, the NSA has been monitoring phone calls and emails of people in Mexico. So apparently it's not enough to spy on American citizens, they feel they have to spy on FUTURE American citizens as well.
Jay Leno
#43. I'm a spy ... I worked for the CIA 15 years. The cover was I worked for the insurance business.
Tom Clancy
#44. The Patriot Act is ludicrous. Terrorists have proved that they are interested in total genocide, not subtle little hacks of the U.S. infrastructure, yet the government wants a blank search warrant to spy and snoop on everyone's communications.
Kevin Mitnick
#45. The difference between being a victim and a survivor is often a low level of situational awareness. You can't be a super-spy, watchful and paranoid every day. But I am more watchful than the average American.
Barry Eisler
#46. Madness,' said Daniel. 'Americans. Playing spy games as the world falls apart.
Adam Baker
#47. it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all. He
George Orwell
#48. In some roles I have to wear fur, and I always make sure it's fake, like in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Faux fur is great because it shows people that faux can look fabulous.
Kristen Johnston
#49. You'll have to do better than that chaps, if you want to kill me!
A.F. Stewart
#50. It's critical how we want to use these spy programs, these electronic capabilities, where we want to draw the line, and who should approve these programs, these decisions, and at what level, for engaging in operations that could lead us as a nation into a war.
Edward Snowden
#51. My favorite movies are the ones that are different the second time, or where you're constantly discovering new things. It's not just genre movies, either, and it's not just about twists. I saw 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy' four times in the theater before I realized it's a love story. I love that.
Drew Goddard
#52. Europeans don't like to talk about intelligence, and they often pretend their countries don't spy.
David Ignatius
#53. Setting people to spy on one another is not the way to protect freedom.
Tommy Douglas
#54. I have a long-standing interest in what I like to think of as 'forbidden knowledge:' methods of unarmed killing, lock picking, breaking and entry, spy stuff, and other things that the government wants only a few select individuals to know.
Barry Eisler
#55. She was the best spy I knew, and that was the most terrifying thing of all.
Embee
#56. He was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession.
Ian Fleming
#57. Now I shall spy on beauty as none has Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as None has cried out. Now I shall try what none Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done.
Vladimir Nabokov
#58. My roommate is a 240-pound homicidal hermit. For dinner he's fixing me a dead fox he scraped off the highway near Ponchatoula, and after that we're taking a leaky tin boat out on a windy lake to spy on some semi-retarded fishermen. Don't you wish you were here?
Carl Hiaasen
#59. On a basic level, he had seen first-hand how his government used the element of fear to accomplish its objectives; the same element of fear that had been used as an excuse to engage its huge war machine in conflicts for the profits of America's oligarchy.
Kenneth Eade
#60. At the end of the day, I like the spy genre, as opposed to the action movie genre, because spies are smart. The successful spies are the smarter spies.
Doug Liman
#61. In 1996, when my first novel, 'Masquerade,' was published, I knew international thrillers - or spy novels, if you prefer - had been the domain of male authors for decades.
Gayle Lynds
#62. At the chinks in the drawn blinds, daylight peered like a spy.
Ross Macdonald
#63. Coming out of 'Spy Kids,' I immediately wanted to do more grown-up roles, and I was turning down a lot of the kind of younger, cheesier roles.
Daryl Sabara
#64. On these sands and in the clefts of the rocks, in the depths of the sea, in the creaking of the pines, you'll spy secret footprints and catch far-off voices from the homecoming celebration. This land still longs for Odysseus.
Homer
#65. The Chinese, on the other hand, were in the position of having an American military spy plane on a Chinese military base and they had their own internal problems to deal with. At first, the Chinese weren't all that belligerent. They were just stalling to get their own bureaucracy in line.
Henry A. Kissinger
#66. Experts say that Britain and France have strong spy agencies; Germany's is competent but afraid to level with its public; the rest are relatively weak, and there is no Europe-wide spy agency.
David Ignatius
#67. Mr. Snowden did not start out as a spy, and calling him one bends the term past recognition. Spies don't give their secrets to journalists for free.
Alex Berenson
#68. And then I spy something new in her. A loneliness. It makes her look so fragile, like a porcelain doll dangling over a marble floor. She's always been dangling there too, terrified that one day she'll fall and shatter.
Sarah Noffke
#69. Children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was
George Orwell
#70. I didn't know what was more disturbing - the fact that something was obviously wrong, or that three faculty members of the world's premiere spy school had forgotten to lock the door.
Ally Carter
#71. I maintained a tactical silence. When you maintain a tactical silence and look people right in the eye, as if drinking in their words, they talk. People like to be listened to, as every researcher knows
every researcher, every writer, every spy.
Michel Houellebecq
#72. The writer:
a spy sent into life by the forces of death. His main objective is to get the information across the border, back into death. Then he can be given a mythic personality: 'he spent time among us, betrayed us, and took the material across the border.
Paul Bowles
#73. They make Spy Kids, they make Scream, they make A Scary Movie. This doesn't do that, so it could be a very bad marriage. I'm trying to keep this potential nightmare quiet because we're just finishing editing.
Terry Gilliam
#74. Friends don't spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.
Stephen King
#75. Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.
Edward Snowden
#76. I wasn't a spy. I'd have been spotted in five seconds. Yes, I was in intelligence, but that covered a multitude of things.
Christopher Lee
#77. I've always loved spy stories. Who can resist?
Gayle Lynds
#78. The appeal of the paranormal bad boy - or James Bond super-spy, as one example of male escapism - can sometimes make everyday problems seem less dire. Thus, a few hours spent immersed in the world of the wicked yet alluring hero is the equivalent of a mini-vacation.
Jeaniene Frost
#79. The Spy Act strikes a right balance between preserving legitimate and benign uses of this technology, while still, at the same time, protecting unwitting consumers from the harm caused when it is misused and, of course, designed for nefarious purposes.
Cliff Stearns
#80. By encouraging men to spy and report on one another, by making it in the private interest of large numbers of citizens to evade the controls, and by making actions illegal that are in the public interest, the controls undermine individual morality.
Milton Friedman
#81. I am literally the worst person at keeping secrets. I'd be the worst spy of all time.
Keri Russell
#82. The soul unto itself
Is an imperial friend,
Or the most agonizing spy
An enemy could send.
Secure against its own,
No treason it can fear;
Itself its sovereign, of itself
The soul should stand in awe.
Emily Dickinson
#83. She looked at me as if I might be one of them a spy from the world of the ignorant.
Dan Chaon
#84. I spy, with my little eye, something that starts with ... G."
"Sausages.
Adam Rex
#85. I think I would make a good spy. I can sort of be a chameleon. People don't notice me very easily. I never get recognized.
Dana Delany
#86. People say talking to yourself is the first sign of madness. It's not. It's eye bloody spy.
Molly Looby
#88. Since knowledge is but sorrow's spy, It is not safe to know.
William Davenant
#89. When a spy is captured, he takes a suicide pill, believing it's better to die than be tortured. By that reasoning shouldn't those same pills be issued to anyone foolish enough to fall in love? - The Lighter Side of Death
Kyra Davis
#90. When I set out to research the story of the Culper Spy Ring, I had no idea where it would take me.
Brian Kilmeade
#91. James Bond had very little to do with the navy at all: it was a convenient front. Bond was secret service from the start ...
Henry Chancellor
#92. I realized in 1988 that my life as a spy specializing in secrets was not only unproductive, it was in sharp opposition to what we actually need: full access to true information, and consequently, the ability to create Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT).
Robert David Steele
#93. You know, for a spy as talented as you, you can really be ... obnoxious," I told her.
She grinned. "I know.
Embee
#94. My favorite sequels are basically all Mike Myers films - 'Wayne's World 2,' 'Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me,' 'Shrek 2.' Anything he does, it's best the second time around. He needs to do 'So I Married an Axe Murderer 2.'
Adam DeVine
#95. I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation's largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations.
John Perkins
#96. Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best.
Alan Furst
#97. adviser, repeatedly requested that the NSA spy on the internal discussions of key member states to learn their negotiation strategies. A May 2010 SSO report
Glenn Greenwald
#98. I used to try to pick locks because I grew up on my grandparents' farm and I started my own little spy club. I would go around the farm and try to break into the shed and try spying on my grandpa. It was ridiculous.
Odette Annable
#99. Nick: My second point is the same one Larry made about the Judge. The Adversary is not going to expect us to send a retarded person as a spy.
Stephen King
#100. In America, you have the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. You've got drones now being considered for domestic surveillance. You have the National Security Agency building the world's giantest spy center.
Heather Brooke
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