12 quotes
In the army it takes an eight-man working party to help a brass hat blow his nose.
The Puppet Masters (1951)
Marriage is not ownership and wives are not property.
The Puppet Masters (1951)
There is one thing no head of a country can know, and that is: how good is his intelligence system? He finds out only by having it fail him.
The Puppet Masters (1951)
I don’t believe in luck, Sam. Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of genius.
The Puppet Masters (1951)
There was nothing under her clothes but girl and assorted items of lethal hardware.
The Puppet Masters (1951)
Beat the plowshares back into swords; the other was a maiden aunt’s fancy.
The Puppet Masters (1951)
Listen, son—most women are damn fools and children. But they’ve got more range than we’ve got. The brave ones are braver, the good ones are better—and the vile ones are viler.
The Puppet Masters (1951)
Digby was a floccinaucinihilipilificator at heart—which is an eight-dollar word meaning a joker who does not believe in anything he can't bite.
The Puppet Masters (1951)
“What is a ‘hunch’?”
“Eh? It’s a belief that something is so, or isn’t so, without evidence.”
“I’d call a hunch the result of automatic reasoning below the conscious level on data you did not know you possessed.”
The Puppet Masters (1951)
McIlvaine continued, “Take the amoeba—a more basic, and much more successful life form than ours. The motivational psychology of the amoeba—”
I switched off my ears; free speech gives a man the right to talk about the “psychology” of an amoeba, but I don’t have to listen.
The Puppet Masters (1951)
The Old Man’s unique gift was the ability to reason logically with unfamiliar, hard-to-believe facts as easily with the commonplace. Not much, eh? Most minds stall dead when faced with facts which conflict with basic beliefs; “I-just-can’t-believe-it” is all one word to highbrows and dimwits alike.
The Puppet Masters (1951)
Mary? After all, what was she? Just another babe. True, I was disgusted with her for letting herself be used as bait. It was all right for her to use her femaleness as an agent; the Section had to have female operatives. There have always been female spies, and the young and pretty ones have always used the same tools.
The Puppet Masters (1951)