William Stevenson > Quotes

“In the November 1940 week of nightmares, when mighty German planes bombed London, British bombers retaliated by attacking Berlin, where the Soviet foreign minister, Molotov, was pressing Hitler for an answer to just exactly when German forces would invade the British Isles.

We had heard of the conference beforehand,' Churchill told Parliament, ' and, although not invited to join in the discussion, did not wish to be entirely left out of the proceedings.”
― William Stevenson, Spymistress: The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II

“The greater danger to individual freedom comes from totalitarian regimes that regard any dissenting view as a threat to be destroyed—no matter if the threat comes from a lonely writer protesting against injustice or from another nation.”
― William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible True Story of the Master Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“There’s a considerable difference between being high-minded and soft-headed.” There”
― William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible True Story of the Master Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“We’d both learned to distrust an elite class that claimed the privilege of leadership in good times and then, having led the people into calamity, let them fight their own way out.”
― William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible True Story of the Master Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“menace in and tried to penetrate the secrets of the new”
― William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible True Story of the Master Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“Hitler used tactics that worked in Germany: firing up fears of communists. He said in one speech that pro-German Englishmen saw Bolshevism as the true enemy. His account was surprisingly detailed. He said terrorists had always been associated in London with Bolshevik anarchists.”
― William Stevenson, Spymistress: The True Story of the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II

“The President would lead U.S. public opinion by defining the economic price Americans would have to pay if Hitler conquered Europe.”
― William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible True Story of the Master Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“I had to dress up in ghastly gold braid and tassles. The result was, I became rather outspoken and brash.”
― William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible True Story of the Master Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“Civilians display true courage by getting on with their daily lives between nights of terror bombing. They do it from a sense of duty. Duty is the mother of courage. Real courage is in facing impossible odds. Vera Atkins, Spymistress”
― William Stevenson, Spymistress: The True Story of the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II

“Perhaps it was foolhardy to suppose that in real life we could undo what had been done, cancel our knowledge of evil, uninvent our weapons, stow away what remained in some safe hiding place. With the devastation of World War II still grimly visible, its stench hardly gone from the air, the community of nations started to fragment, its members splitting into factions, resorting to threats and, finally, to violence and to war. The certainty of peace had proved little more than a fragile dream. “And so the great democracies triumphed,” Sir Winston Churchill wrote later. “And so were able to resume the follies that had nearly cost them their life.” Prophetic as he was, Churchill did not foresee the awesome extremes to which these follies would extend: diplomacy negotiated within a balance of nuclear terror; resistance tactics translated into guidelines for fanatics and terrorists; intelligence agencies evolving technologically to a level where they could threaten the very principles of the nations they were created to defend. One way or another, such dragon’s teeth were sown in the secret activities of World War II. Questions of utmost gravity emerged: Were crucial events being maneuvered by elite secret power groups? Were self-aggrandizing careerists cynically displacing principle among those entrusted with the stewardship of intelligence? What had happened over three decades to an altruistic force that had played so pivotal a role in saving a free world from annihilation or slavery? In the name of sanity, the past now had to be seen clearly. The time had come to open the books.”
― William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible True Story of the Master Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“In September 1945, he had recommended to his British masters that Professor May be kept from returning to London, not for the plausible and practical reasons he had then stated, but because he realized May would lead British bloodhounds to the London end of the atom-spy networks. His policy would have prevailed if Stephenson had not intervened. Otherwise, Maclean was getting away, literally, with murder.”
― William Stevenson, Intrepid's Last Case

“Perfect courage is to do without witnesses what one would be capable of doing with the world looking on.”
― William Stevenson, Spymistress: The True Story of the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II

“Donovan agreed that dictatorship was made vulnerable by dependence on secrecy. “The soft area in a totalitarian state is the security system,” he said. “So much has to be kept secret that machinery to process information is cumbersome. A dictator is apt to think he functions in a totally secure environment and he gets careless.”
― William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible True Story of the Master Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“This country is like a family,” he muttered, quoting George Orwell, “with the wrong members in control.” Even”
― William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible True Story of the Master Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." - Winston Churchill, t the meeting in the City of London on the final day of fighting in OPERATION TORCH”
― William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid

“But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart: the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril.”1”
― William Stevenson, Spymistress: The True Story of the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II

“France was eclipsed by the solid German block, producing far more than twice her number of military males each year, towering up grim and grisly. It was the vengeful women of France who would have to fill gaps in any resistance armies. Paris”
― William Stevenson, Spymistress: The True Story of the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II

“A similar situation exists today,” said Stephenson. “The easy way out is to pretend there are no crises.”
― William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible True Story of the Master Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“To him, Britain had an obligation to keep her word, to make sacrifices, to suffer pain, or to die to save the less fortunate.”
― William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible True Story of the Master Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“But of course Hitler had long before declared war unofficially and secretly against America, his ultimate target. He had written: ‘Our strategy is to destroy the enemy from within. Our aim is to conquer the enemy through himself.’ “This”
― William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible True Story of the Master Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“time immemorial. I see them guarding their”
― William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible True Story of the Master Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“When the history of World War II is revised in the light of the secret war, this may be the most striking element: the great engines of destruction did not determine the outcome. The invincibility of free people and the ingenuity of free minds did.”
― William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible True Story of the Master Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“Heavy water”
― William Stevenson, Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible WWII Narrative Of The Hero Whose Spy Network And Secret Diplomacy Changed The Course Of History

“Gubby had proved primitive methods could undermine the most advanced technology,”
― William Stevenson, Spymistress: The True Story of the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II

“The weapons of secrecy have no place in an ideal world. But we live in a world of undeclared hostilities in which such weapons are constantly used against us and could, unless countered, leave us unprepared again, this time for an onslaught of magnitude that staggers the imagination”
― William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible True Story of the Master Spy Who Helped Win World War II

“They cannot know What makes you as you are Nor can they hear Those voices from afar Which whisper to you You are not alone… They cannot reach That inner core of you The long before of you The child inside Deep deep inside Which gives the man his pride… What you are They can never be And what they are Will soon be history.”
― William Stevenson, Spymistress: The True Story of the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II

“It's easy to look brave when things go your way - Ver Atkins, Spymistress”
― William Stevenson, Spymistress: The True Story of the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II

“Holding the reins were men like Mackenzie King, whose calculated inaction had almost silenced Gouzenko forever.”
― William Stevenson, Intrepid's Last Case

“IG Farben's dividends double in the first year that its subsidiary sent Zyklon-B to gas death-camp”
― William Stevenson, Spymistress: The True Story of the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II

“Tommy’ was used 128 years ago in a War Office guide for a soldier to apply for ‘marching money’ at two and a half pence per mile to cover himself, wife, and child. The Duke of Wellington in 1794 found a Grenadier with a bayonet thrust in the chest, a sabre cut across the head and a bullet in his lungs who gasped, ‘It's all in a day's work, sir.’ His name was Thomas Vera.”
― William Stevenson, Spymistress: The True Story of the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II