Lapham’s Quarterly

I will never again command an army in America if we must carry along paid spies. I will banish myself to some foreign country first.

Once suspicion is aroused, everything feeds it.

For sooner will men hold fire in their mouths than keep a secret.

Secrecy lies at the very core of power.

Secrets define us, they mark us, they set us apart from all the others. The secrets which we preserve provide a key to who we are, deep down.

Spies are of no use nowadays. Their profession is over. The newspapers do their work instead.

It was funny how I could feel all alone and under surveillance at the same time.

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

Guard more faithfully the secret which is confided to you than the money which is entrusted to your care.

If you read somebody’s diary, you get what you deserve.

The first duty of a good inquisitor is to suspect especially those who seem sincere to him.

The life of spies is to know, not be known.

Even a paranoid can have enemies.

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any program our fear has sketched out.

Nothing is hidden from the eyes of the observing world.

A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.

We must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest.

If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation.

There is a sickness among tyrants: they cannot trust their friends.