Top 150 Spy Quotes

‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion.

Ghostery lets you spy on the spies in your computer. For each web page you visit, this extension uncloaks some – but not all – of the invisible tracking software that is working behind the scenes.

I’ve been called a spy of Israel since 1996, and since I made my documentary film in 2000 the FBI has investigated me as an agent of Iraq. The FBI has also opened up an investigation into my wife calling her a KGB spy.

Setting people to spy on one another is not the way to protect freedom.

I think in some ways what Snowden is, is he’s a mix of a cold war spy novel and post-9/11 spy novel.

Fester has a lot going for him. He’s 120 volt AC and DC, and he’s great with dynamite. His only trouble is that he’s one of the great losers of our time. He would make a great spy, but he kinda stands out in a crowd.

I probably read Harriet the Spy about 70,000 times.

‘Homeland’ is a thriller with a lot of cloak and dagger spy stuff, which is one of the things that makes it so much fun.

I’ve always enjoyed disappearing into a crowd in New York. As an actor, I love to spy, and it’s hard to be a good spy if everyone is looking at you. Also, I’m pretty shy. I don’t really like a lot of attention.

Imagine a ‘Mission: Impossible’-style spy or infiltration mission into the core, the very heart of the Empire’s military-industrial complex, the most secure facility in the Empire. You have a small band of experts with complementary skills who, together, are able to do these amazing things.

The Patriot Act is ludicrous. Terrorists have proved that they are interested in total genocide, not subtle little hacks of the U.S. infrastructure, yet the government wants a blank search warrant to spy and snoop on everyone’s communications.

I’ll tell you what I really enjoy. We all go to the movies, we all watch television, we know what they’re about, how they work. When the main character is a cop or a spy, it’s very exciting, but I also very much enjoy when the main characters are nobodies – a trucker.

Starting in my late 20s, I would go on one fishing trip a year to an exotic location. I went to India and caught what was essentially a giant carp. I went to Thailand and got myself arrested as a suspected spy. I went to the Congo and got malaria. But even the bad stuff is material.

I was inspired by all of it. ‘The Avengers,’ ‘Harry Palmer,’ ‘The Prisoner,’ ‘The Man from UNCLE,’ ‘In Like Flint.’ Of course, there’s a huge shadow of Bond – Bond is the monolith of spy movies – but it’s not just about Bond; there were a lot of other things that influenced me.

Le Carre’s voice – patrician, cold, brilliant and amused – was perfect for the wilderness-of-mirrors undertow of the Cold War, and George Smiley is the all-time harassed bureaucrat of spy fiction.

I used to try to pick locks because I grew up on my grandparents’ farm and I started my own little spy club. I would go around the farm and try to break into the shed and try spying on my grandpa. It was ridiculous.

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

Spy plots are hard, really hard.

What’s great about ‘Spy Hunter’ is that we have an amazing title, an awesome car, and a great theme song, and we can use that to launch a new franchise that hopefully will compete with the other ones but just be kind of the more fun, video game version of a spy movie.

It’s about these people who are inextricably together for whatever reasons, and they happen to be in the spy world. It’s about relationships, and the bottom line is, that’s why you care.

If the FBI gets the ‘back doors’ it wants, Internet services would be required to create a massive online infrastructure for law enforcement to spy on members of the public.

Our mobile phones have become the greatest spy on the planet.

I’ve always loved spy stories. Who can resist?

I think I was 13 years old when my father put in my hands ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.’ It was the first real adult book I ever read, and it opened a new world.

I’d rather live in a world where firms don’t have these enormous incentives to spy on individuals.

‘Raazi,’ for me, is a human story – it’s much more than just a spy thriller.

I grew up on all of the great spy movies and TV series of the Sixties – not just Bond, but Derek Flint and the Avengers and Modesty Blaise and the Man from UNCLE and on and on. Every time I sit down to work on Cinderella, I’m writing a love letter to all of those characters.

‘Hot Pursuit,’ ‘Pitch Perfect 2,’ ‘Trainwreck,’ and ‘Spy’ were all being done in the last year. All four of those movies I just mentioned are not rom-coms: they’re all about women doing different things.

During the Civil War, the Underground Railroad became a spy network, so we could still have fresh stories for these characters years into the future, with desperate people still doing desperate things.

Some people think my father was a spy, because of working for that government agency in Vietnam, but he can’t find his car keys, much less keep a national secret.

When I set out to research the story of the Culper Spy Ring, I had no idea where it would take me.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a spy detective or a rock star.

Young people looking for adventure fiction now generally turn to fantasy, but for those of a certain age, the spy thriller has long been the escape reading of choice.

I wanted to be a journalist. The other thing I wanted to be was a spy.

As a senator, Obama denounced the Big Brother provisions of Bush’s post-9/11 Patriot Act, particularly its sections enabling the state to spy on Americans without their knowledge. After taking power, Obama acquired his other face. That face speaks far less, but when it does, it justifies Bush’s policies.

Breaking a cardinal rule of spy craft, I actually let it be known that I wanted to work for the CIA.

I’ve always wanted to play a spy, because it is the ultimate acting exercise. You are never what you seem.

The Russians win when we allow our intelligence community to be politicized, when we allow political opposition research to function as a basis for a warrant to spy on American citizens.

I think I honestly invented my own genre, the historical spy novel.

Today’s difference between Russia and the United States is that in Russia everybody takes everybody else for a spy, and in the United States everybody takes everybody else for a criminal.

I love the spy genre.

The Spy Act prohibits keystroke logging, hijacking, and phishing.

I am on Facebook, but mainly as a way to spy on my children. I find out more about them from their Facebook pages than from what they tell me.

I am literally the worst person at keeping secrets. I’d be the worst spy of all time.

Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?

The idea of aerial military surveillance dates back to the Civil War, when both the Union and the Confederacy used hot-air balloons to spy on the other side, tracking troop movements and helping to direct artillery fire.

I’ve always wanted to be a spy, and frankly I’m a little surprised that British intelligence has never approached me.

I would never vote to allow federal agents to spy on American citizens without warrants.

I wanted to look like the most diverse writer in comics! Spy genre, space genre, crime genre, and then you realize that it’s all actually the same thing.

I had such a good time working with Paul Feig on ‘Spy.’

What I’m getting at is, you know, if we really want to get serious about helping all the people living in the street and getting people jobs, we could just hire half the people in the country to spy on the other half.

I think ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ was the best, or rather the one I enjoyed doing the most.

It’s a very dangerous and lonely thing, I imagine, to be a spy: to have friendships that are deceptions, that are not honest.

I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation’s largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations.

But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it’s the writer or the spy.

Since knowledge is but sorrow’s spy, It is not safe to know.

I’m almost incapable of lying. I’d be a terrible spy.

For a book to function… it has to be a functioning reality. The character has to be real, and I imagine that’s exactly what happens for a spy who is in deep cover.

I don’t like to go to the movies to see violence or some kind of spy thing with all kinds of information you have to assimilate to understand the plot.

In my head, I think I’d make a perfect spy, but in reality, I don’t think I’d fare very well.

In 1996, when my first novel, ‘Masquerade,’ was published, I knew international thrillers – or spy novels, if you prefer – had been the domain of male authors for decades.