Body of Lies Quotes

“Interrogate them,” said Ferris. “Send them to Gitmo. Send them to Hani. Whatever.” “Well, sure, interrogation,” said Hoffman. “That helps. But that’s not the real pop. Even if the guy we capture doesn’t say shit, the bad guys have to assume he has blabbed. So they’ll have to change their cell-phone numbers, and their Internet”
― David Ignatius, Body of Lies

“Luck is the residue of good planning.”
― David Ignatius, Body of Lies

“there is only one kind of narrative where the accuracy of what’s described on the printed page cannot be questioned, and that is fiction.”
― David Ignatius, Body of Lies

“was still a superpower—militarily. The Praetorian Guard had too much power, not too little. It was the political institutions that got weak. The corruption and ruin came later. Rome rotted from the inside out.”
― David Ignatius, Body of Lies

“A great empire and little minds go ill together,’” said Azhar. “That was the observation of Edmund Burke, I believe.”
― David Ignatius, Body of Lies

“Facing a difficult adversary, it is sometimes best to play upon his arrogance. Lure him forward; draw him in. The right pressure on just the right spot and he will collapse from within.”
― David Ignatius, Body of Lies

“The agency had to be less smugly bureaucratic than Time, Inc., he reckoned, but he had been wrong. It was worse. It was a culture that had been lying to itself for so long that people had lost the ability to differentiate between what was real and what wasn’t. Failure wasn’t acceptable—so, as far as the agency was concerned, the CIA never made mistakes. These were people who believed their own PowerPoint presentations.”
― David Ignatius, Body of Lies

“Here was the genius of American intelligence—that it could fly its mechanical bird of prey over the world’s most hostile terrain. The folly was that most of the time it didn’t know what it was looking for down below. A bird with perfect eyesight and no brain.”
― David Ignatius, Body of Lies

“So this is what it feels like. This helpless feeling, this is love.”
― David Ignatius, Body of Lies

“She always imagined his spy life as a version of James Bond, with nice suits and martinis. If she saw him now, she would tell him to go change. Gretchen liked everything about Ferris except his real life.”
― David Ignatius, Body of Lies

“Hani has two speeds, slow and reverse.”
― David Ignatius, Body of Lies

“Like anything precious, she is veiled”
― David Ignatius, Body of Lies

“The child was born in the Arab world, and in that sense, Roger and Alice had gone into the land itself, been penetrated by it, bled into its veins (p. 349).”
― David Ignatius, Body of Lies