American Spy Quotes

“The first few moments after you meet someone are precious, because the data on them is plentiful and your own subjectivity has yet to interfere.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“I don’t like to say what I’ve read. That’s how you disclose the most about yourself.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“I hope that if you're called to resist injustice you'll have the courage to do so. I hope you'll love fiercely and freely. In those ways I hope you'll be good Americans”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“But it’s not enough just to discuss things. We are the elites. We can’t just talk about human rights, while we conveniently forget that we condemn thousands of children to die because we couldn’t agree on the best policy to help. Or in my government, if we can’t agree on a pay cut so that a little clinic out in the country can be built. Those kinds of choices make us part of the international complicity of men of good conscience.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“It's not romantic to be so loyal that you compromise your sense of yourself.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“I learned that a secret is power, that power in application is force, that force is strength, and strength advantage.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“You’ve likely never seen me like that. Almost no one has. It has never earned me anything to share my darker self with other people. The only anger I ever expose to the world is through implication, by suggesting that I’m on the brink of no longer being able to contain my fury. That is what a woman’s strength looks like when it’s palatable: like she is containing herself.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“down near the Brooklyn Bridge and Tweed courthouse. As a kid I’d read something about the courthouse that has stuck with me my entire life: In the nineteenth century, Boss Tweed had used its construction as a pretext to embezzle millions from New York State. When they finally got around to trying him for that crime, they did it in the courthouse named after him. How hilarious an irony—here was a city government building celebrating one of the most corrupt members in its history.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“soldier without ideology is a criminal.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“After I heard, I switched the radio to music and turned it up as load as it would go and let myself cry...You've likely never seen me like that. Almost no one has. It has never earned me anything to share my darker self with other people. The only anger I ever expose to the world is through implication, by suggesting that I'm on the brink of no longer being able to contain my fury. That is what a woman's strength looks like when it's palatable: like she is containing herself.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“Thomas Sankara renamed the country Burkina Faso—the Land of Incorruptible People—and wrote the national anthem.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“Live with your head in the lion’s mouth.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“Son, after I’m gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“While her gift for secret put distance between us, it also taught me the value of intelligence: I learned that a secret is power, that power in application is force, that force is strength, and strength advantage.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“Pop looked up and out the window. I reminded myself that he loved me. He wasn’t subjecting me to an unending drumbeat of criticism, not from his perspective. He was trying to show me he cared.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“He smiled weakly, and I knew his mind was still on going down there and parking it perfectly. I found my sympathy for him in the knowledge that he was harder on himself than he was on anyone else, including me.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“I think he shouldn’t have taught us how to shoot. It wasn’t a beneficial skill, or even a neutral one. It was knowledge that had attracted and bred the violence in my life.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“Maybe I was a Fed for as long as I was so that if I ever had to, I could safely elevate myself above the the law.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“Corrupt politicians hide out in parties”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“Reaganomics was an unpleasant little philosophy … and when you added the punitive character of our country to it, we emerged as a breeding ground for a really virulent strain of cruelty.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“Imperialism tries to dominate us from both inside and outside our country. Through its multinational corporations, its big capital, its economic power, imperialism tries to control us by influencing our discussions, and influencing national life.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“It's humbling to have your social fluency, your sense of yourself as a competent, independent person, upended by a foreign city.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“People thought I was the good sister, but really I was only good at being sneaky.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“There have been a lot of men in this world who have tried to shape it by getting it to conform to their own ideology. My own beliefs are too inconsistent and contradictory to expect them to change the world by having other people conform to them.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“Robbie and I disagreed about guns. He believed that owning one was his right as an American, which he must’ve picked up when the Panthers out in Oakland were arming themselves. That was screamingly funny when I thought about it: a black man, one who’d been locked up twice, clinging to the Second Amendment. The strongest gun laws the country had ever passed were to prevent the men who’d inspired him, the Oakland Panthers, from having guns. If he’d been a little more intentional about his stance, it would have been subversive. But he wasn’t. He owned a gun because he liked them, and thought he was entitled to do so.

Pop raised me to believe that guns weren’t for civilians. I think that stance was too soft; I think he shouldn’t have taught us to shoot. It wasn’t a beneficial skill, or even a neutral one. It was knowledge that had attracted and bred the violence in my life.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“To get by, I told my colleagues that I didn’t care about politics, which felt like a ridiculous thing to claim. They bought it though. Very few of those men understood having no choice about whether they were political or not: Unlike me, they weren’t people who’d had their existence politicized on their behalf.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“Thomas believing that I was a lunatic who had traveled across the world because I was obsessed with him — was much harder on my pride.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“In the United States I thought of myself as Black before I thought of myself as American. In Ouagadougou, routinely, those designations were reversed: People saw me as American first. The American. I can’t say I preferred it that way, but it gave me a new perspective.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“Of our seven million inhabitants, over six million are peasants. And this peasantry, our peasantry, has been subjected to the most intense exploitation at the hands of imperialism and has suffered the most from the ills we inherited from colonial society: illiteracy, obscurantism, pauperization, cruelty in many forms, endemic diseases, and famine.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy: a Cold War spy thriller like you've never read before

“Sankara argued that a society that oppressed women couldn’t be a successful one, and committed himself to women’s rights: banning forced marriage, polygamy, and female genital mutilation. He argued that the poorest on the globe were the most vulnerable to climate change and started a tree-planting initiative to stop the encroaching desert.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy: a Cold War spy thriller like you've never read before