Deciding whether to trust or credit a person is always an uncertain task.

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.

Mind sees magic because it can be deceived when allowed by heart.

Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches...

Never let a day pass that you will have cause to say, I will do better tomorrow.

And come, blue deeps! magnificently strown With coloured clouds - large, light, and fugitive.

I have never been So insulted in all my life I could swallow the seas To wash down all this pride First you run like a fool Just to be at my side And now you run like a fool But you just run to hide.

Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Almost everyone agrees the world is not the way it ought to be. It's called the problem of evil.

But the nuclear powers still cling tenaciously to their weapons.

Only love can break your heart.

There's nothing about me that's selfish.