John le Carré Quotes

Then the people in this prison are intellectuals? The woman smiled. Yes, she said, they are reactionaries who call themselves progressive: they defend the individual against the state. Do you know what Khrushchev said about the counter-revolution in Hungary? Liz shook her head. She must show interest, she must make the woman talk. He said it would never have happened if a couple of writers had been shot in time.

And this is a prison for spies? Liz persisted. It is a prison for those who fail to recognize Socialist reality; for those who think they have the right to err; for those who slow down the march. Traitors, she concluded briefly. But what have they done? We cannot build communism without doing away with individualism. You cannot plan a great building if some swine builds his sty on your site.

The English! The rich have eaten your future and your poor have given them the food—that’s what’s happened to the English.

Sometimes she thought Alec was right—you believed in things because you needed to; what you believed in had no value of its own, no function.

I am afraid that as a nation we tend to over-organise. Abroad that passes for efficiency.

“It is not fashionable to quote Stalin but he said once, ‘half a million liquidated is a statistic, but one man killed in a traffic accident is a national tragedy.’ He was laughing, you see, at the bourgeois sensitivities of the mass. He was a cynic. But what he meant is still true: a movement which protects itself against counter-revolution can hardly stop at the exploitation—or the elimination, Leamas—of a few individuals. It is all one, we have never pretended to be wholly just in the process of rationalising society. Some Roman said it, didn’t he, in the Christian Bible—it is expedient that one man should die for the benefit of many.”
“I expect so,” Leamas replied wearily.
“Then what do you think? What is your philosophy?”
“I just think the whole lot of you are bastards,” said Leamas savagely.

If they do not know what they want, how can they be so certain they are right?

He possessed, however, that persistent inquisitiveness which for journalists and lawyers is an end in itself.

I should have guessed you’d never have the guts to do your own dirty work, Fiedler. It’s typical of your rotten little half-country and your squalid little Service that you get big uncle to do your pimping for you. You are not a country at all, you’re not a government, you’re a fifth-rate dictatorship of political neurotics.

Alec, what do you believe in? Don't laugh—tell me. She waited and at last he said: I believe an eleven bus will take me to Hammersmith. I don't believe it's driven by Father Christmas.

I would say that since the war, our methods—ours and those of the opposition—have become much the same. I mean you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?

Thus we do disagreeable things, but we are defensive. That, I think, is still fair. We do disagreeable things so that ordinary people here and elsewhere can sleep safely in their beds at night. Is that too romantic? Of course, we occasionally do very wicked things; he grinned like a schoolboy. And in weighing up the moralities, we rather go in for dishonest comparisons; after all, you can't compare the ideals of one side with the methods of the other, can you, now?

I read a story once about a poet who bathed himself in cold fountains so that he could recognise his own existence in the contrast.

He had come to the end of the chase, and was already sickened by the kill.

You can’t experiment with tradition.