John le Carré Quotes

British novelist and spy (1931–2020)

John le Carré is the pen-name of David John Moore Cornwell (19 October 1931 – 12 December 2020), who was a British writer of spy novels and a former spy himself.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Birth Name: David John Moore Cornwell

Alternative Names: David Cornwell • John le Carre

From Wikidata (CC0)

In recent years, Union Bank of California, American Express Bank International, BankAtlantic and Wachovia have all been caught moving huge sums of drug money, but no one went to jail. The banks just admitted to criminal conduct and paid the government a cut of their profits.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the war on terror we did everything wrong that we could have done.

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.

There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.

There are some Arabs who think that the Germans did the right thing by the Jews. This makes it easy to recruit Arab terrorist.

Findley was not quite a character, thank you! Frau Ellenberger retorted furiously. He wasn't a character at all. Mr Findley was assembled entirely from characteristics stolen from other people!

It was the other music that he was hearing: the feeling that, while she was telling him one story, he was listening to a different one, and so was she.

Nothing in life... even a few broken bones, is without its reward.

A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, Brother Michael liked to say. A bad man survives but loses his soul.

No problem exists in isolation, one must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn.

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.