Best Cia Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“When you keep telling yourself a lie, at some point you buy your own cover story, like a CIA spy or something.”

“Scouting is like CIA work and investigative work. You create a lot of stuff and try a lot of stuff. Some works and some doesn't. I try to get creative.”

“I would be a terrible CIA officer in real life.”

“The world has changed, the CIA is having to change, and again, the challenge for someone like me as a spy novelist is to write realistically about where they're actually going.”

“The post office actually achieves its mission. I wish we could say the same of the CIA.”

“Even when I was at CIA, I'd go to visit foreign leaders and I'd say, 'You know, I'm not a diplomat. I'm just an old CIA guy'... I said, 'If I wanted to be diplomatic, I'd have been a diplomat.'”

“I thought I was done making CIA movies after 'The Bourne Identity.' I really had used my father's work in Iran-Contra on 'The Bourne Identity.' You get one experience like that in your life where you have personal exposure to something, and you put it in a movie. That's it.”

“I was working for the CIA and prohibited from speaking publicly.”

“When I became director of CIA, it was just clear to me intuitively, without a whole lot of science behind it, that we had expanded rapidly and inefficiently. So I arbitrarily picked a number, 10 percent, and I said over the next 12 months, we are going to reduce our reliance on contractors by 10 percent.”

“The CIA in real life, we know, is looking for new kinds of cover. It's looking for new platforms, as they like to say, and it's trying to use the revolution in communications technology, the ability to use all sorts of corporate entities in ways that are hard to detect to get our spies in the places where they need to be.”

“People in the CIA, they marry each other. They're like actors! We have to travel without much warning to far-flung places, and it's very hard to communicate what our experiences are like to those in the outside world.”

“Throughout my career, I had the great fortune to experience firsthand as well as to witness what it means to be a CIA officer.”

“I play DEA, CIA, FBI, LAPD; I got 'em all.”

“I never one time mentioned anything to any coach about retirement or joining the CIA or anything like that.”

“I was much less offended than others were by the CIA's interrogations in the years after September 11.”

“I've often found, as I did with 'Bourne,' where I was inspired by the events of Iran-Contra when I designed the CIA for the 'Bourne' franchise, that the reality of how things work is usually more compelling than the superficial, made-up version that Hollywood sometimes does.”

“There is no worse place for an intelligence service like CIA to be than on Page 1, above the fold in your daily newspaper.”

“When you work for DC, it's sort of like working for the CIA. You have a vow of silence.”

“I never write about CIA conspiracies or the FBI or mafia or anything like that because I just don't understand that world. But I think I do understand individual human harmfulness.”

“Many senior government officials, CIA, FBI, counter terrorism officials - when they look back at the decade, they effectively conclude that the United States overreacted after 9/11.”

“I like to take people you wouldn't really think people would write novels about: an aqueduct engineer, a code-breaker, a hedge-fund manager. It's in those sorts of lives that I find more fascination than in a CIA operative or a Marine or something like that.”

“I suddenly realized at the CIA that I had to make life-and-death decisions about people.”

“The main points were: one, the amount of Israel's nuclear weapons, how many Israel had, that no one could predict or know, including the CIA. They were thinking about a number like 10 or 15. But I came out with a number between 150 to 200.”

“Let's remember, the CIA's job is to go out and create wars.”

“The CIA now assesses that four nations - Iraq, North Korea, Russia and, to the surprise of some specialists, France - have undeclared samples of the smallpox virus.”

“The CIA will only hire people with impeccable credentials to be a translator. 'Impeccable credentials' means you've never lived outside the United States.”

“I think cleaning house at the CIA needed to happen.”

“I wouldn't even know - and I spent three years in the CIA - I wouldn't even know how you'd start a covert action program in a place like Iran. It would be extraordinarily difficult.”

“When I was a CIA officer we would have meetings and you don't know what people's politics are... We were there to serve a mission that we were focused on that mission.”

“I joined the CIA in 1985 as an operations officer in the Clandestine Service.”

“First of all, CIA follows the law.”

“It's hard for me to imagine that some people in the CIA who had firsthand knowledge would be unable to recognize that this would be helpful information for a soldier's death.”

“The Panetta/Petraeus combo is a powerful tandem. I've seen both of them up close and personal at the CIA and in Iraq.”

“I would not restart, under any circumstances, an interrogation program at CIA.”

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

“My Life in CIA is the first time that I've ever written a story in my own name.”

“From my time at the CIA to my time in the House, I've dedicated my career to protecting our democracy and ensuring it works for all of us.”

“As an old man who remembers the intellectual exhilaration and the pleasure of having done good work that characterized the CIA when it was young, I wonder if it might not be better to speak and think in terms of restoring its culture.”

“I'm going to be so much better a president for having been at the CIA that you're not going to believe it.”

“The original judgment of the FBI, the Secret Service, and the CIA was that there were three shots. I don't think that convinced us except as a statement by people, many of them who were familiar with ballistics. This question troubled me greatly.”

“It is illegal for the CIA to spy on Americans and an affront to our Republic to spy on the Senate.”

“One might oppose the CIA program, but Abu Ghraib it ain't.”

“As the plot of 'Condor' unfolds, you'll understand that nothing is sacred in the pharmacy world or in the behind-the-scenes workings of the CIA and FBI.”

“It's pretty well known that the CIA has been installing friendly dictators around the world for years.”

“Who better to help formulate and to lead debate on fighting ISIS and Islamic extremists than an Arabic-speaking former CIA case officer who has been fighting the war on terrorism?”

“We need to make is to strengthen the position of the director of the CIA.”

“I know CIA like the back of my hand.”

“When I wrote my eighth thriller, 'Inside Out,' in 2009, the villains were a group of CIA and other government officials who colluded to destroy a series of tapes depicting Americans torturing war-on-terror prisoners.”

“Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn't feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone.”

“When I became director of CIA, it was just clear to me intuitively, without a whole lot of science behind it, that we had expanded rapidly and inefficiently. So I arbitrarily picked a number, 10 percent, and I said over the next 12 months, we are going to reduce our reliance on contractors by 10 percent.”

“CIA has been treated with enormous respect and our expertise is valued for what we bring to the table.”

“It doesn't take long to become aware of the presence of the CIA in Laos.”

“I got a top-secret security clearance and served in the CIA.”

“Of course we wish that more people involved in the leak of my true CIA identity had been prosecuted, but the system worked.”

“Before I was elected to represent southwestern Texas in the U.S. Congress, I spent almost a decade as an undercover officer in the CIA. I served in places where Russia has geopolitical interests, and learned that Russia has one simple goal: to erode trust in democratic institutions.”

“I always wanted to work for the CIA growing up. I'd be a CIA operative in Hollywood that made movies to manipulate the masses.”

“Popular culture tells you that schools and parents don't know what's going on, the police are dogs, politicians are all liars and scum, and any crime that's not committed by the Mafia is done by the CIA.”

“My CIA godfather told me he'd never heard any American speak Japanese so well.”

“As a journalist, I try to avoid talking to American diplomats, because I am stunned again and again by just how little grasp they have of what people are really feeling in a country. Especially CIA guys. Maybe they're just really good at playing stupid, but I don't think so.”

“When I was about, I'd say, 18 or 19 years old, I wanted to be a part of the CIA just because they know those intimate secrets... So I was just always into knowing. I like to know things.”

“Famously, the CIA is somewhere where marriages hardly ever last because it's obviously such a strange lifestyle.”