Alex Hirsch Quotes

When I was 12 years old, I was obsessed with codes, conspiracies, and secret messages.

There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files.

That’s the thing about spies. Most of the secrets we keep are from each other.

Everybody spies on everybody, I mean, that's just a fact.

It was one of those great miracles of history that they managed to smuggle an Enigma machines out to Britain just before they were invaded by the Nazis.

I found out only recently that we were making an index of enemy code signs.

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days…. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

… a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.

One of the great things about conspiracy theories is that they explain everything.

No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.

There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different.

I've always been captivated by the Voynich Manuscript - the mysterious, 15th-century encrypted codex that still baffles cryptologists, linguists, and historians.

For an old spy and codebreaker like myself, nothing in the world happens by coincidence.

I'm absolutely obsessed with conspiracies and have been since I was a kid.

'Day Men' provides a magnificent challenge in that it deals with a secret society within a secret society.

Donald Trump believes in conspiracies. He has thin skin and is impulsive.

Former CIA employee Joseph Weisberg's 'An Ordinary Spy' may attract attention for how much it redacts - whether by authorial choice or by CIA design - but its power comes from the growing frustration Weisberg's fictional alter ego feels at a system designed to betray seeming innocents in the most casual and cruel manner possible.

We have to solve the encryption problem. It is not easy.

There's a big part of me that would love to be a secret agent. But if I showed up to do an investigation and interrogate someone now, they wouldn't be able to take me seriously. I've ruined that for myself.

Of all those in the army close to the commander, none is more intimate than the secret agent.

But first, my friends, I need you to do something for me. We have two spies in the back of the auditorium.

The Jesuits…are a secret society – a sort of Masonic order – with superadded features of revolting odiousness, and a thousand times more dangerous.

Few persons can be made to believe that it is not quite an easy thing to invent a method of secret writing that shall baffle investigation. Yet it may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve.

He was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession.