Jason Fagone > Quotes

“For all the harmless innocence conjured by the word "library", the Friedmans knew the truth: a library, properly maintained, could save the world - or burn it down.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies

“It's not quite true that history is written by the winners. It's written by the best publicists on the winning team.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies

“Truth was truth and anything else was fuckery.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

“One way of thinking about science is that it’s a check against the natural human tendency to see patterns that might not be there. It’s a way of knowing when a pattern is real and when it’s a trick of your mind.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

“It made them feel, as all good books do, less alone.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

“So this is where the CIA began—with J. Edgar Hoover telling the British to go to hell, and the British not appreciating it.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

“making yourself understood to another person is essentially a problem of cryptology.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

“the measure of a person was her ideas”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

“To really live a life in search of knowledge, you must admit when you are wrong.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies

“Nikola Tesla predicted in 1926 that “when wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

“Before the coast guard sent the FBI a decrypt, the coast guard clerks typed “SIS Dupe” at the bottom of the sheet, beneath the line that said “CG Translation” and “CG Decryption.” These once-secret files, located in the National Archives and finally declassified in 2000, prove that the coast guard, not the FBI, solved these Nazi radio circuits.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes

“His car, he envisioned, would be almost completely recyclable, the death of one car giving birth to part of another in an endless cycle, a concept known as “cradle-to-grave sustainability.”
― Jason Fagone, Ingenious: A True Story of Invention, Automotive Daring, and the Race to Revive America

“A library, properly maintained, could save the world, or burn it down.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies

“The president of Harvard changed admissions rules to keep Jews out”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

“If you would like to imagine the birth of the mighty National Security Agency, please visualize two men in a small room, one with a pug nose, pecking at a typewriter, the other a dandy in a suit and bow tie, smoking a pipe, wondering what his wife was up to at home, and if she was missing him.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

“America First,” a campaign slogan of Woodrow Wilson, had been adopted by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

“For the first eight months of the war, as incredible as it sounds, William and Elizebeth, and their team at Riverbank, did all of the codebreaking for every part of the U.S. government: for the State Department, the War Department (army), the navy, and the Department of Justice.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes

“No code is ever completely solved, you know. —ELIZEBETH S. FRIEDMAN”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

“You can never get sick of too much knowledge.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

“It was once remarked of a well-known Oxford scholar that, while he had no enemies, he was hated by all his friends. Something of the same kind would express the feelings towards the FBI of its fellow U.S. agencies.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

“He had always found this a comforting thought, that the age of barbarism was not long past, that if humans failed to be kind it was because they were still children, historically speaking”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes

“the Friedmans did it all despite having little to no training in mathematics.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

“a nonderanged boss,”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

“Cryptographers are professional paranoids”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

“These once-secret files, located in the National Archives and finally declassified in 2000, prove that the coast guard, not the FBI, solved these Nazi radio circuits.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes

“the importance of choosing the right words for things, even if those words offended people. She didn’t like it when she heard a friend say that a person who had died had “passed away” or that a staggering drunk at a party was “a bit indisposed.” It was more important to be honest. “We glide over the offensiveness of names and calm down our consciences by eulogistic mellifluous terms, until our very moral senses are dulled,” she wrote. “Let things be shown, let them come forth in their real colors, and humanity will not be so prone to a sin which is glossed over by a dainty public!”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes

“Above the doors it reads, ELIZEBETH SMITH FRIEDMAN, PIONEER OF INTELLIGENCE-LED POLICING. These things happened for two reasons: because women went looking for Elizebeth’s ghost, and because her ghost was making noise in the archives. She was there inside the Marshall Library, rattling the doors of the vault, and she was in the “government tombs,” the National Archives, where her records from the Invisible War were finally declassified. The ghost also cried out from unexpected places. Three of the index cards in William’s collection contain brief, verifiably true comments about how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI took credit for feats of spycatching actually performed by Elizebeth and the coast guard. These comments were obviously written by Elizebeth—William wasn’t in a position to know. Each card is a knife slipped between the ribs of Hoover, Elizebeth’s patient revenge.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes

“It was anti-Nazi Google.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

“This is a love story. In 1916, during the First World War, two young Americans met by chance on a mysterious and now-forgotten estate near Chicago. At first they seemed to have little in common. She was Elizebeth Smith, a Quaker schoolteacher who found joy in poetry. He was William Friedman, a Jewish plant biologist from a poor family. But they fell for each other . Within a year they were married. They went on to change history together, in ways that still mark our lives today. They taught themselves to be spies— of a new and vital kind.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes

“authors of more recent books have also praised the bureau for destroying the Nazi networks in South America. But the FBI didn’t intercept the messages. It didn’t monitor the Nazi circuits. It didn’t break the codes. It didn’t solve any Enigma machines. The coast guard did this stuff—the little codebreaking team that Elizebeth created from nothing. During the Second World War, an American woman figured out how to sweep the globe of undercover Nazis. The proof was on paper: four thousand typed decryptions of clandestine Nazi messages that her team shared with the global intelligence community. She had conquered at least forty-eight different clandestine radio circuits and three Enigma machines to get these plaintexts. The pages found their way to the navy and to the army. To FBI headquarters in Washington and bureaus around the world. To Britain. There was no mistaking their origin. Each sheet said “CG Decryption” at the bottom, in black ink.”
― Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes