Erich Maria Remarque Quotes

Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.

I've met enough KGB colonels in my life.

My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education.

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.

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.

In my professional work with the Agency, by the late '70s, I had come to question the value of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the intelligence agency's impact on American policy.

By the late '70s I had come to question the point of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the CIA's overall charter.

Only enemies of the Soviet Union can think of the KGB as some kind of secret police.

The Central Intelligence Agency is in a rotten state. Today, Central Intelligence Agency has hardly any worthwhile operations behind the iron curtain. In their briefings they present a rosy picture to outsiders but the awful truth remains under the TOP SECRET label of the agency.

I had a stalker break into my house a couple times. They didn't leave any fingerprints or take anything - I was being followed.

I don't want to be followed by paparazzi; that terrifies me.

The thing about the Russian secret police and the Soviet secret police is that one never leaves the secret police. Once a KGB man, always a KGB man.

I find it quite amusing that it's feasible that your opponents can have somebody watching you.

In 'A Scanner Darkly,' as in 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,' all intersubjective relations devolve into webs of suspicion and betrayal.

Every time I leave the house or we go anywhere, there is a paranoia. We always have to watch for specific cars and specific signs that we're being photographed.

I'm a tad paranoid. I think the person in front of me is following me the long way round.

The very shadows seem to listen.

I was just about to ask you the same thing. I know you followed me. Don't look so suprised. It's called a rearview mirror. Are you stalking me for a specific reason?

When I was a kid, I was like everyone else: afraid of getting nuked. We had drills in school - Sweden was very close to the Soviet Union. There was definitely a lot of tension.

"World War III, was the Cold War".

The air seemed poisoned with fear and hatred. People eyed on another suspiciously, and the streets smelled of a silence that knotted your stomach.

Suspicion amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they never fly by twilight.

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

I never know if the person I'm shaking hands with is coming to kill me. That's something you have to live with when you cross the lines.