By the late '70s I had come to question the point of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the CIA's overall charter.

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.

The betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo.

The use of the polygraph has done little more than create confusion, ambiguity and mistakes.

The U.S. is, so far as I know, the only nation which places such extensive reliance on the polygraph. It has gotten us into a lot of trouble.

I saw a limit to what I was giving as kind of a scam I was running on the KGB, by giving them people that I knew were their double agents fed to us.

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.

The FBI, to its credit in a self-serving sort of way, rejects the routine use of the polygraph on its own people.

The only thing I ever withheld from the KGB were the names of two agents whom I personally had known and handled and had a particular feeling for.

The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent.

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.

Doubt is an acceptable risk for happiness.

I don't want to die without telling you that I love you, " Everett's voice was a faint, wavering whisper, and his lips swollen and bloodied. "I always have.

Aha," Andrea said. "I'm going to ignore that you just referred to yourself as 'sugar woogums'.

Believe in what you can do and be not deterred by what others say.

If the infinite had not desired man to be wise, he would not have bestowed upon him the faculty of knowing.

If you create the stage setting and it is grand, everyone who enters will play their part.

Here Spring just grows and greens and warms, spreading life, wrapping us in her arms, until suddenly we realize that she's not a girl anymore. She's a woman. A woman named Summer.

Achieving gender equality is about disrupting the status quo - not negotiating it.

There should always be in sight the draw — a kind of a beacon that draws you on through the labyrinth.