John le Carré
From Wikiquote
John le Carré is the pen-name of David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931), a British writer of spy novels, and a former spy himself.
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[edit] Sourced
[edit] The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963)
- "This is a war," Leamas replied. "It's graphic and unpleasant because it's fought on a tiny scale, at close range; fought with a wastage of innocent life sometimes, I admit. But it's nothing, nothing at all beside other wars – the last or the next."
[edit] Tinker (1974)
- He worked for the fleshy side of the Foreign Office and his job consisted of lunching visiting dignitaries whom no one else would have entertained in his woodshed.
[edit] Smiley's People (1979)
- Blackmail is more effective than bribery.
- So odd to think of the Devil as a fumbler!
- Against stupidity, the gods themselves fight in vain.
- The neglected are too easily killed.
- Balls, the lot of it. It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
- You see a lot - your eyes get very painful.
- There's one thing worse than change and that's the status quo.
[edit] The Constant Gardener (2001)
- [She] reports that [the company] recently donated fifty million dollars to a major U.S. teaching hospital, plus salaries and expenses for three top clinicians and six research assistants. Corruption of university Common Room affiliations is even easier: professorial chairs, biotech labs, research foundations, etc. 'Unbought scientific opinion is increasingly hard to find.'
[edit] The Mission Song (2006)
- Savages...are by nature rash. They have no middle gear. The middle gear of any man is self-discipline.
- Luck's just another word for destiny...either you make your own or you're screwed.
- If you're in a hole, don't dig, they say.
- When you assimilate, you choose.
- Elections are a Western jerk-off.
- Why is it that so many men of small stature have more courage than men of size?
- Peace, gentlemen, it is well known, does not come of its own accord, and neither does freedom. Peace has enemies. Peace must be won by the sword.
- The friends of my friends are my friends.
- Never trade a secret, you'll always get the short end of the bargain.
- We were both hybrids: I by birth, he by education. We had both taken too many steps away from the country that had borne us to belong anywhere with ease.
- No problem exists in isolation, one must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn.
- A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul.
- Nothing in life... even a few broken bones, is without its reward.
[edit] Radio Interview (November 2008)
Interview with Ramona Koval. The Book Show, Australian Broadcasting Commission Radio National. (19 November 2008)
- There are some Arabs who think that the Germans did the right thing by the Jews. This makes it easy to recruit Arab terrorist.
- There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.
- We were not faced (in the cold war) in a conflict with people who are prepared to die for their cause. We weren't in conflict with people whose idea is to kill as many as they could.
- In the war on terror we did everything wrong that we could have done.
- You can't make war against terror. Terror is a technique of battle. It's a tactic that has been employed since time immemorial. You can conduct clandestine action against terrorists, and that must be done.
- To operate an intelligence network against the Islamist terror is terribly difficult because they don't have a central command and control center such as we would understand. Therefore you cannot penetrate at the top and find out what will happen on the ground.
- Because we are so unfamiliar with the motivation of the people we are dealing with, we are more afraid of them than we need to be.
- On one hand we go like hell for every terror cell we can find, we penetrate it, we destroy it. On the other hand, there is a much bigger need for a political solution.
