To the extent that I considered the personal burden of harming the people who had trusted me, plus the Agency, or the United States, I wasn't processing that.

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.

I can see the caravanserai, like a mirage in the distance. The heat hums. I thought I saw water. What would you have on these trade winds for your comfort?

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

There is only one form of political strategy in which I have any confidence, and that is to try to do the right thing and sometimes be able to succeed.

In doing that which we most enjoy, we will probably make our most significant contribution to society, and the contribution we make to society determines our rewards.

All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.

That's what we should do, Hazel Grace: We should team up and be this disabled vigilante duo roaring through the world, righting wrongs, defending the weak, protecting the endangered.

I feel like I'm playing more of a role walking down the red carpet than when I'm playing an ordinary woman covered in sweat.

The very notion of tabu is one of the rightest notions in the world. Better any old tabu than none, for a man cannot be said to be"on the side of the stars" at all, unless he makes refusals.

I tried to read the Bible, I did, but it always felt like a much less awesome Lord of the Rings.

Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war.