"The quality of Moscow's hired killers had slipped since the KGB's glory days."
Alexander Litvinenko
"There is no such thing as a former KGB man."
Vladimir Putin
"To go again over the history of the struggle of resistance ... and to think 'Where are all these people today Where is the KGB' is very inspiring"
Natan Sharansky
"The only thing I ever withheld from the KGB were the names of two agents whom I personally had known and handled and had a particular feeling for."
Aldrich Ames
"I've met enough KGB colonels in my life."
Garry Kasparov
"I was very restless. I really wanted to be a part of a kind of a progressive society. I was fed up with these Communist doctrines and you were hassled all the time with members of the Party committee who were KGB, what you have to do, where in the West you can go or not to go."
Mikhail Baryshnikov
"As soon as I finished the Russian course, I was sent to Korea with the task of trying to establish an agent network, a network in the so called maritime provinces."
George Blake
"I know not every mom is a secret KGB spy, but every mom has this whole other life. Every dad and every person has this whole other life."
Keri Russell
"Nobody ever leaves the KGB, by the way. Once you're there, no matter what you say you've done next, nobody ever leaves the KGB."
Rush Limbaugh
"KGB was inseparable part of the Soviet Union and the whole structure of the Soviet society. We believe that the achievements of the Soviet Union and of the Soviet society, it's main achievements until the split in 1991, it was at the same time the main achievements of the KGB, because it was working for the same cause."
Vladimir Semichastny
"Let's say a Soviet exchange student back in the '70s would go back and tell the KGB about people and places and things that he'd seen and done and been involved with. This is not really espionage; there's no betrayal of trust."
Aldrich Ames
"I've never been to the Soviet Union and the main reason for that is I was warned several times by people from the KGB who had defected to the West that it would be very unsafe for me to go there"
Brian Crozier
"In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One."
Yakov Smirnoff
"I've been called a spy of Israel since 1996, and since I made my documentary film in 2000 the FBI has investigated me as an agent of Iraq. The FBI has also opened up an investigation into my wife calling her a KGB spy."
Scott Ritter
"I saw a limit to what I was giving as kind of a scam I was running on the KGB, by giving them people that I knew were their double agents fed to us."
Aldrich Ames
"I was not extremely patriotic about Mother Russia. I played their game, pretending. You have to deal with, you know, party people, KGB. Horrifying."
Mikhail Baryshnikov
"Perhaps my information hurt the Soviet Union more than it helped. I have no idea. It was not something I ever discussed with the KGB officers that I was dealing with."
Aldrich Ames
"Of course the biggest mafia in Russia has always been the government; in Soviet times, the Communist Party, and now a circle of former KGB and FSB."
Martin Cruz Smith
"The revolution is an amalgam of former Party functionaries, quasi- democrats, KGB officers, and black-market wheeler-dealers, who are standing in power now and have represented a dirty hybrid unseen in world history"
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"The childless experts on child raising also bring tears of laughter to my eyes when they say, I love children because they're so honest. There is not an agent in the CIA or the KGB who knows how to conceal the theft of food, how to fake being asleep, or how to forge a parent's signature like a child."
Bill Cosby
"You would think that if neoliberals were in any way honest, after the collapse of the Soviet Union the first thing to do is get rid of the Red Army and the KGB, and build up the economy. Instead, they just get rid of the economy and keep the military and the KGB."
David Graeber
"Nobody got me out," Nellie replied. "They just let me go. They think I'm a deranged Jonah Wizard fan. Apparently, the hotel's full of them. A couple of idiots actually jumped off the front balcony. Can you picture that?" "In Technicolor," Amy said bitterly. "That low-down KGB reject!" Dan fumed. "I can't believe she cheated me-right when I was in the middle of cheating her!"
Gordon Korman
"then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and eight years after the people had torn down the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the hated founder of the KGB, in Moscow - it was admittedly a shock. Nevertheless, I decided to give Putin a chance. He seemed dynamic and capable of learning. But I had to bury my hopes after just a few months. He proved to be an autocrat - and, because the West let him do as he pleased, he became a dictator."
Garry Kasparov
"Most people think spies are afraid of guns, or KGB guards, or barbed wire, but in point of fact the most dangerous thing they face is paper. Papers carry secrets. Papers can carry death warrants. Papers like this one, this folio with its blurry eighteen year old faked missile photographs and estimates of time/survivor curves and pervasive psychosis ratios, can give you nightmares, dragging you awake screaming in the middle of the night."
Charles Stross