A Man Called Intrepid Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“We in the Americas are no longer a faraway continent to which the eddies of controversies beyond the seas could bring no interest or no harm. . . . The vast amount of our resources, the vigor of our commerce and the strength of our men have made us vital factors in world peace whether we choose it or not.” To the Canadian Prime”
― William Stevenson, Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible WWII Narrative Of The Hero Whose Spy Network And Secret Diplomacy Changed The Course Of History

“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

“The British Secret Intelligence Service had been rendered useless in Europe when our professional agents were cut down almost in a single stroke after conventional armed resistance to the Nazis ended on the Continent and Hitler entered Paris.”
― William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible True Story of the Master Spy Who Helped Win 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

“Will the democracies consent to their own survival?”
― William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible True Story of the Master Spy Who Helped Win 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

“The most sophisticated apparatus for conveying top-secret orders was at the service of Nazi propaganda and terror,” Stephenson noted. “The power of a totalitarian regime rested on propaganda and terror. Heydrich had made a study of the Russian OGPU, the Soviet secret security service. He then engineered the Red Army purges carried out by Stalin. The Russian dictator believed his own armed forces were infiltrated by German agents as a consequence of a secret treaty by which the two countries helped each other rearm.* Secrecy bred suspicion, which bred more secrecy, until the Soviet Union was so paranoid it became vulnerable to every hint of conspiracy. Late in 1936, Heydrich had thirty-two documents forged to play on Stalin’s sick suspicions and make him decapitate his own armed forces. The Nazi forgeries were incredibly successful. More than half the Russian officer corps, some 35,000 experienced men, were executed or banished.* The Soviet Chief of Staff, Marshal Tukhachevsky, was depicted as having been in regular correspondence with German military commanders. All the letters were Nazi forgeries. But Stalin took them as proof that even Tukhachevsky was spying for Germany. It was a most devastating and clever end to the Russo-German military agreement, and it left the Soviet Union in absolutely no condition to fight a major war with Hitler.”
― 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

“The most tragic thing about he war was not that it made so many dead men, but that it destroyed the tragedy of death," wrote the American poet John Peale Bishop. "Not only did the young suffer in the war, but so did every abstraction that would have sustained and given dignity to their suffering.”
― William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Dear Lord Lest I continue My complacent way Help me to remember Somewhere out there A man died for me today —As long as there be war I then must Ask and answer Am I worth dying for? That”
― 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

“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

“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.’ . . .”
― 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

“one of the double agents supposedly under British control, arrived in Stephenson’s New York office fresh from talking with his German spy masters about Pearl Harbor six months before the Japanese struck there. Hoover refused to believe his extraordinary story. When Commander Montagu later spoke of the “ghastly period” when the FBI became obstructive, he was still sick with dismay over TRICYCLE’s inability to get through to Hoover the significance of his Pearl Harbor reports. The incident is significant for another reason. It offers an important lesson to those who would revise history long after the event. At any given time, the intelligence signals foreshadowing a move by the enemy are part of the general uproar of information, some true, but much of it possibly false, including deception material deliberately planted by the enemy or (even more effectively) by the enemy’s secret friends. In hindsight, it may seem that the true warnings should have stood out like beacons. A distant observer, looking back, is unaware of all the other distractions, some of them contradictory, that at the time seemed equally important. The lesson applies as much to the varied evaluations of ULTRA as it does to the particular case of Pearl Harbor.”
― 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