Stephen King
Author
"Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too."
Spy quotes
Spy
171 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Cary Grant
Actor
"I have no plans to write an autobiography, I will leave that to others. I'm sure they will turn me into a homosexual or a Nazi spy or something else."
Sun Tzu
Military Strategist
"Be subtle! be subtle! and use your spies for every kind of business."
Diogenes
Philosopher
"He was seized and dragged off to King Philip, and being asked who he was, replied, "A spy upon your insatiable greed.""
Sun Tzu
Military Strategist
"They [spies] cannot be properly managed without benevolence and straightforwardness."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside spy — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Spy quotes (page 1 of 9)
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"Further, an excess of legislation defeats its own ends. It makes the whole population criminals, and turns them all into police and police spies. The moral health of such a people is ruined for ever; only revolution can save it."
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"For the good are always the merry, / Save by an evil chance,/ And the merry love the fiddle,/ And the merry love to dance: / And when the folk there spy me,/ They will all come up to me, / With,”Here is the fiddler of Dooney!” / And dance like a wave of the sea."
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"The end and aim of spying in all its five varieties is knowledge of the enemy; and this knowledge can only be derived, in the first instance, from the converted spy. Hence it is essential that the converted spy be treated with the utmost liberality."
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"Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity."
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"Every member of the society spies on the rest, and it is his duty to inform against them. All are slaves and equal in their slavery... The great thing about it is equality... Slaves are bound to be equal."
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"And many more Destructions played In this ghastly masquerade, All disguised, even to the eyes, Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies."
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"It is ten thousand times cheaper to pay the best spies lavishly than even a tiny army poorly."
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"...she woke up in time to see the sun sending up spies ahead of him to mark out the road through the dark. He peeped up over the door sill of the world and made a little foolishness with red."
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"This false distance is present everywhere: in spy films, in Godard, in modern advertising, which uses it continually as a cultural allusion. It is not really clear in the end whether this 'cool' smile is the smile of humour or that of commercial complicity. This is also the case with pop, and its smile ultimately encapsulates all its ambiguity: it is not the smile of critical distance, but the smile of collusion"
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"Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible."
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"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."
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"An ambassador has no need of spies; his character is always sacred."
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"Signs cannot be represented, in a spy's report, so damningly as words."
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"A handful of red sand from the hot clime Of Arab deserts brought, Within this glass becomes the spy of Time, The minister of Thought."
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"We reject the use of national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime."
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"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."
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"I read a lot of books for information, like doctor books, spy books. . . ."
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"Now I basically just read spy stories because they're about solving a puzzle within the constraints of history. It's the tick tock, the clockwork that I'm interested in."
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"Above thought is the intellect, which still seeks: it goes about looking, spies out here and there, picks up and drops. But above the intellect that seeks is another intellect which does not seek but stays in its pure, simple being, which is embraced in that light."
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"I got nothing. Even the spies I'm spying on who are spying on other spies got nothing."
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