Extracts
On Spies
Selected from the Winter 2016 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
Nothing is hidden from the eyes of the observing world.
—Aleksandr Pushkin, 1837
The bulk of the people consist in a manner wholly of discoverers, witnesses, informers, accusers, prosecutors, evidences, swearers, together with their several subservient and subaltern instruments, all under the colors and conduct of ministers of state and their deputies.
—Jonathan Swift, 1726
Their careless or criminal violation of truth and justice was covered by the consecrated mask of zeal and they might securely aim their poisoned arrows at the breast either of the guilty or the innocent, who had provoked their resentment, or refused to purchase their silence.
—Edward Gibbon, 330
The life of spies is to know, not be known.
—George Herbert, c. 1621
It is true that Madame had her own system for managing and regulating this mass of machinery; and a very pretty system it was: the reader has seen a specimen of it, in that small affair of turning my pocket inside out, and reading my private memoranda. Surveillance, espionage—these were her watchwords.
—Charlotte Brontë, 1853
They all loved games of hazard, took a childish interest in card tricks, and envied the cleverness of the card sharp.
—Maxim Gorky, 1907
Last winter certain individuals in the Morbihan, the Côtes-du-Nord, and Ille-et-Vilaine showed themselves ill-disposed. Make out a list of some score of those who seemed most inclined to disturbance.
—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1807
There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told.
—Edgar Allan Poe, 1840
Guard more faithfully the secret which is confided to you than the money which is entrusted to your care.
—Isocrates, c. 370 BC
Identifying communists is not easy. They are trained in deceit and trickery and use every form of camouflage and dishonesty to advance their cause.
—J. Edgar Hoover, 1958
Secrecy lies at the very core of power.
—Elias Canetti, 1960
Even a paranoid can have enemies.
—Henry Kissinger, 1977
The first duty of a good inquisitor is to suspect especially those who seem sincere to him.
—Umberto Eco, 1980
“Miss Belle, that man ain’t no rebel. I seen him among the Yankees in the street. If he’s got secesh clothes on, he ain’t no secesh. That man’s a spy—that man’s a spy.”
—Belle Boyd, 1862
For when my outward action doth demonstrate The native act and figure of my heart In complement extern, ’tis not long after But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at. I am not what I am. —William Shakespeare, c. 1570
One of the twelve disciples, called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said to them, “What will you give me, and I will deliver him to you?” And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver. And from that time he sought opportunity to betray him.
—The Gospel According to Matthew, c. 33
To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968
Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1735
Mystery is the essence of man’s nature, and whatever presents itself to mankind under a mysterious appearance will always excite curiosity and be sought, even when men are satisfied that the veil covers nothing but a cipher.
—Giacomo Casanova, 1750
For sooner will men hold fire in their mouths than keep a secret.
—Petronius, c. 60
You may crush the wasp, or smoke the mosquito, or brush away the ant, and get some intervals of repose in spite of renewed attacks; they give you, too, some warning signs of their approach—but the police spy is invisible and never out of hearing; whether you are relaxing in frank and thoughtless merriment, or abandoning yourself to the sweet and delicious dreams of friendship; in the market or the street, the drawing room, the cafe, or the church, there he is.
—Charles Dickens, 1850
Spies are of no use nowadays. Their profession is over. The newspapers do their work instead.
—Oscar Wilde, 1895
Perfect records of private lives are being aggregated, they’re being intercepted, they’re being stored in a new, more intrusive manner, and at a scale that’s never happened before. In the darkness, without our knowledge, without our consent, things changed over the last several decades.
—Edward Snowden, 2015
Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any program our fear has sketched out.
—George Eliot, 1860
There is a sickness among tyrants: they cannot trust their friends.
—Aeschylus, c. 458 BC
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.
—William T. Sherman, 1863
We must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850
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.
—Nuruddin Farah, 1998
Once suspicion is aroused, everything feeds it.
—Amelia Edith Barr, 1885
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SPIES
Winter 2016
If only John Hollander hadn't been called back, it would be a fine thing to have him on The World in Time to discuss that booklength allegory of poets as spies, Reflections on Espionage: "About the master-spy whose code name was Cupcake, little is known that can be told. He worked for an altogether inconvenient little republic which ceased to exist a good time ago. The regular, encoded radio transmissions, copies of which were eventually recovered by sources in his native country, have only recently been deciphered, the eleven-phase transposition grid he used for enciphering his messages having been guessed at earlier but rejected as being too archaic. Cupcake must have employed other modes of communication with the many agents he mentions in these dispatches; but only those reports to his control, through the control to a director named Lyrebird, briefly to one Grusha, or, strangely enough, to the agent Image about whom nothing is known, have been preserved."