The trouble is, when professional spies go out of their way to make a definitive statement about one of their own, the public tends to believe the opposite: which puts us all back where we started.

It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.

The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It's just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.

Tyranny is like the electric wiring in an old house. A tyrant dies, the new tyrant takes possession, and all he has to do is drop the switch.

Power expands through the distribution of secrecy.

Let's all pretend to be someone else, and then perhaps we'll find out who we are.

Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.