23 Quotes by Jason Fagone

The president of Harvard changed admissions rules to keep Jews out.

So this is where the CIA began – with J. Edgar Hoover telling the British to go to hell, and the British not appreciating it.

Secrets staying secret is the norm. Officials only get riled up when the opposite happens – when secrets are leaked, published, disclosed.

A library, properly maintained, could save the world, or burn it down.

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.

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.

America First,” a campaign slogan of Woodrow Wilson, had been adopted by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

There were possibly three or at most four persons” in the whole United States who knew the slightest thing about codes.

Cryptographers are professional paranoids.