Funny Shit to Say When People Are Eavesdropping

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Quotes tagged as "eavesdropping" Showing 1-25 of 25

"A pair of werewolves occupied another booth. They were eating raw shanks of lamb and arguing about who would win in a fight: Dumbledore from Harry Potter books or Magnus Bane.
"Dumbledore would totally win," said the first one. "He has the badass Killing Curse."
The second lycanthrope made a trenchant point. "But Dumbledore isn't real."
"I don't think Magnus Bane is real either," scoffed the first. "Have you ever met him?"
"This is so weird," said Clary, slinking down in her seat. "Are you listening to them?"
"No. It's rude to eavesdrop," said Jace."
― Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes

"The key to good eavesdropping is not getting caught."
― Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book

"I shouldn't have eavesdropped, but sometimes, that's the only way to find out the truth."
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

"Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding 'like Princess Di') but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening.

And it is the English, specifically, who are the targets of this. Few Americans have heard of Wales. All of them have heard of Ireland and many of them think they are Irish. Scotland gets a sort of free pass, especially since Braveheart re-established the Scots' anti-English credentials among the ignorant millions who get their history off the TV."
― Peter Hitchens

"There was some women in a café the other week that I was sat in, and she came up and she sat down with her mate and she was talkin' loudly goin' on about "oh the baby's lovely." They said it's got, er, lovely big eyes, er, really big hands and feet. Now that doesn't sound like a nice baby to me. I felt like sayin' it sounds like a frog. But I thought I don't know her, there's only so much you can say to a stranger. I don't know what kept me from sayin' it."
― Karl Pilkington

"She had become really quite expert, she thought, at listening as though she didn't listen, at sitting in other people's lives just for a minute while they talked round her."
― Katherine Mansfield, Miss Brill

"You create silent enemies by revealing how much God had blessed you. There are people who are unhappy about your success and your big dreams are just too heavy for them to bear, so they will try to break you into pieces. Extinguishers of dreams are everywhere, and you can decode them by their nosy attitude towards your affairs. That is why its pertinent to keep few friends, talk less about yourself, and focus on other things pretending as if you don't exist. It doesn't make you faded or out of life, but the chances of getting your prospects destroyed will be very slim."
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Infinity Sign

"I will have the children read Hamlet as soon as it is practical. There are some useful cautions against eavesdropping to be gleaned from that."
― maryrose wood, The Mysterious Howling

"Eavesdropping is such a regular-person activity."
― Franny Billingsley, Chime

"Roosevelt fought hard for the United States to host the opening session [of the United Nations]; it seemed a magnanimous gesture to most of the delegates. But the real reason was to better enable the United States to eavesdrop on its guests. Coded messages between the foreign delegations and their distant capitals passed through U.S. telegraph lines in San Francisco. With wartime censorship laws still in effect, Western Union and the other commercial telegraph companies were required to pass on both coded and uncoded telegrams to U.S. Army codebreakers. Once the signals were captured, a specially designed time-delay device activated to allow recorders to be switched on. Devices were also developed to divert a single signal to several receivers. The intercepts were then forwarded to Arlington Hall, headquarters of the Army codebreakers, over forty-six special secure teletype lines. By the summer of 1945 the average number of daily messages had grown to 289,802, from only 46,865 in February 1943. The same soldiers who only a few weeks earlier had been deciphering German battle plans were now unraveling the codes and ciphers wound tightly around Argentine negotiating points.

During the San Francisco Conference, for example, American codebreakers were reading messages sent to and from the French delegation, which was using the Hagelin M-209, a complex six-wheel cipher machine broken by the Army Security Agency during the war. The decrypts revealed how desperate France had become to maintain its image as a major world power after the war. On April 29, for example, Fouques Duparc, the secretary general of the French delegation, complained in an encrypted note to General Charles de Gaulle in Paris that France was not chosen to be one of the "inviting powers" to the conference. "Our inclusion among the sponsoring powers," he wrote, "would have signified, in the eyes of all, our return to our traditional place in the world." In charge of the San Francisco eavesdropping and codebreaking operation was Lieutenant Colonel Frank B. Rowlett, the protégé of William F. Friedman. Rowlett was relieved when the conference finally ended, and he considered it a great success. "Pressure of work due to the San Francisco Conference has at last abated," he wrote, "and the 24-hour day has been shortened. The feeling in the Branch is that the success of the Conference may owe a great deal to its contribution."

The San Francisco Conference served as an important demonstration of the usefulness of peacetime signals intelligence. Impressive was not just the volume of messages intercepted but also the wide range of countries whose secrets could be read. Messages from Colombia provided details on quiet disagreements between Russia and its satellite nations as well as on "Russia's prejudice toward the Latin American countries." Spanish decrypts indicated that their diplomats in San Francisco were warned to oppose a number of Russian moves: "Red maneuver . . . must be stopped at once," said one. A Czechoslovakian message indicated that nation's opposition to the admission of Argentina to the UN.

From the very moment of its birth, the United Nations was a microcosm of East-West spying. Just as with the founding conference, the United States pushed hard to locate the organization on American soil, largely to accommodate the eavesdroppers and codebreakers of NSA and its predecessors."
― James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency from the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century

"All at once it was just too much, and Harvey felt something about to snap. He drew back into the shadowy side of the doorway, out of site. Then he slid down the wall to the ground and put his palm over his mouth to hold in his breath and his feelings both. He'd forced in more air then he could hold, and his lungs were burning. More importantly, his heart hurt... He wished he hadn't eavesdropped."
― Yukako Kabei, Kieli, Volume 7: As the Deep Ravine's Wind Howls

"Oh, that? I never thought it was eavesdropping, Aslan. Wasn't it magic?"

"Spying on people by magic is the same as spying on them in any other way."
― C. S. Lewis

"I have a terrible weakness for collecting snatches of other people's conversations, and occasionally I'm rewarded with unusual fragments of knowledge. My favorite of the day came from a large but shapely woman sitting nearby whom I learned was the owner of a local lingerie shop. 'Beh oui,' she said to her companion, waving her spoon for emphasis, 'il faut du temps pour la corsetterie.' You can't argue with that. I made a mental note not to rush things next time I was shopping for a corset, and leaned back to allow the waiter through with the next course."
― Peter Mayle, Encore Provence: New Adventures in the South of France

"Any conversation including the mention of Roald Dahl, Ray Bradbury, or Emily Dickinson is one worth getting into or at least eavesdropping."
― Don Roff

"Whatever you do, don't make it worse by trying to come up with some flimsy excuse for why you were in the ventilation shaft, Lina told herself."
― Jaleigh Johnson, The Secrets of Solace

"Why did people do it? Why this herd curiosity about a street, a house, windows, doors? He was a public servant, the Inspector mused, but there were times when he would enjoy loading all the rubbernecks onto barges and towing them out to sea to be served, with ceremony, to sharks."
― Ellery Queen, The Player on the Other Side

"I'm going to my room," Jessie Kay called. "Y'all do me a favor and argue loud enough so I can listen in without having to strain myself."
― Gena Showalter, The One You Want

"I especially like eavesdropping on women my age. Besides being titillating, it also helps me gauge where I'm at in comparison."
― Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

"Eavesdropping, Mother?' Ramses inquired.
'It is a shameful habit, but cursed useful,' I said, quoting something he had once said, and was rewarded by one of his rare and rather engaging smiles."
― Elizabeth Peters, He Shall Thunder in the Sky

"Nobody in the government is talking. It's a case of national security."
"Of course. The national security of spying on U.S. citizens."
― Kenneth Eade, The Spy Files

"Eavesdropping is secretly listening to the private conversation of others without their consent, as defined by Black's Law Dictionary.[1] This is commonly thought to be unethical and there is an old adage that "eavesdroppers seldom hear anything good of themselves... eavesdroppers always try to listen to matters that concern them."[2]"
― Black's Law Dictionary

"Criticize me all you wish," he returned coolly, "but remember that you come to me because of the very actions you denounce. Now, do you want to hear more, or are you going to stand there and pass judgment on me all day?"
― Jennifer McKeithen, Atlantis: On the Tides of Destiny

"He spoke to old friends in other departments, and listened to the "porcelain gossip" in the senior-officer toilets."
― Jason Matthews, Red Sparrow

"A place has a curious quality when you have only a partial understanding of its language, and in those early months the sensation was especially peculiar. At first I moved in a cloud of unknowing, the speech around me impenetrable, but it quickly grew less elusive as I began to understand single words and then phrases and now even snippets of conversation. On occasion, I found myself stumbling into situations more intimate than I would have liked, the city was no longer the innocent place it had been when I arrived."
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

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