Charlie English > Quotes

“Every Autumn now my thoughts return to snow. Snow is something I identify myself with. Like my father, I am a snow person.”
― Charlie English

“In the nineteenth century, Fritjof Nansen wrote that skiing washes civilization clean from our minds by dint of its exhilarating physicality. By extension, I believe that snow helps strip away the things that don't matter. It leaves us thinking of little else but the greatness of nature, the place of our souls within it, and the dazzling whiteness that lies ahead.”
― Charlie English

“Intellectual freedom is essential to human society—freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate, and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such a trinity of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship.”
― Charlie English, The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature

“Poland was the most crucial of Eastern Bloc nations: when communism collapsed in 1989, this was the first domino to fall, and it was literature that won the war here, as the Polish dissident Adam Michnik maintained.”
― Charlie English, The CIA Book Club: The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War

“In this sense, Hitler´s painting supports [Hannah] Arendt´s theory of National Socialism--that it was defined by its banality and lack of empathy. The Nazis relied on the ability of people not to imagine themselves in someone else´s shoes. The lack of a connection was very much the point.”
― Charlie English, The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Modernism, and Hitler's War on Art

“Fischer also believes that Cyclone suited the image U.S. intelligence leaders liked to project of the CIA, of an organization packed with spooks and paramilitaries who fought in war zones, in sharp contrast to the more intellectual pursuit of sponsoring books and publishing. “The bottom line was that it didn’t fit their image of themselves as CIA operators who went around recruiting spies,” he said. “The operators, the spy guys, think covert action is a waste of time, waste of money,” he said. The result was that some of the people who worked on Polish operations were not properly recognized for their work, despite being “heroes of the story,” as Fischer puts it. Richard Malzahn, who ran QRHELPFUL from Langley, was one of those who suffered. Far from being promoted, he was packed off to be a lowly analyst.”
― Charlie English, The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature

“reservoir”
― Charlie English, The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature

“maintained. ‘We should build a monument to books,”
― Charlie English, The CIA Book Club: The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War