Jimmy Fallon Quotes

I've always been baffled by critics of the CIA, who are horrified that it does illegal things. That is the purpose of an intelligence service: to perform illegal acts.

For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.

The men and women of the CIA are a national treasure.

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

A major theme in all my books is that the CIA is not only the first line of defense but they should also be the first line of offense.

I think all governments engage in intelligence gathering vis-a-vis other governments.

Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.

Since real spies are so good, you never really know what actual spying is. But I do think spying is a lot more dangerous than we are led to believe.

From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it's a big, bureaucratic place. Think 'post office with spies.'

I've consciously tried not to romanticize anything, especially not intelligence work. I've always said that I've been writing a series of episodic, naturalistic novels. The people just happen to be spies, politicians, civil servants.

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.

When you join the CIA, you have to make some peace with whether you are comfortable psychologically and philosophically, with the use of force and using it clandestinely.

It was given for all purposes to which a secret service fund should or could be applied to the public benefit—for spies, if the gentleman pleases.

It is incontestable that even under the best of circumstances and when dealing with the friendliest and most stable of allies that intelligence organizations of foreign powers must not be permitted to become established on American soil and should be discouraged wherever possible from taking root any place in this Hemisphere.

[Referring to the CIA:] We coexist. They work, and we work.

Absolutely get rid of CIA agents from units and the territory of Cambodia.

There are more foreign intelligence officers inside the US now, working against US interests, than there were at the height of the cold war.

The FBI had more agents in New York than the CIA had agents abroad. [In the 1990s].

The CIA was corrupted during the Reagan Administration.

If you’re going to be involved with espionage, you’ve got to be motivated. It’s not fun and games. It’s dirty and dangerous. There’s always the chance that you’re going to get burned.

I served 10 years on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, and I had the distinct privilege of meeting with real U.S. spies throughout the globe.

No one would argue that it's in the United States' interest to have independent knowledge of the plans and intentions of foreign countries. But we need to think about where to draw the line on these kind of operations so we're not always attacking our allies, the people we trust, the people we need to rely on, and to have them in turn rely on us.

Europeans don't like to talk about intelligence, and they often pretend their countries don't spy.

Everybody has a hacking capability. And probably every intelligence service is hacking in the territory of other countries. But who exactly does what? That would be a very sensitive piece of information. But it's very difficult to communicate about it. Because nobody wants to admit the scope of what they're doing.

One of the things that distinguishes the CIA from the State Department is that the CIA is both asked to, and authorized to, steal secrets. So if the question is whether the CIA steals secrets, the answer is yes.