"It is not fashionable to quote Stalin but he said once, "half a million liquidated is a statistic, and one man killed in a traffic accident is a nat… - John le Carré

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 besides other wars—the last or the next.

George Smiley: [quoting an old letter from Bill Haydon about Jim Prideaux] He has that heavy quiet that commands. He's my other half. Between us we'd make one marvelous man. He asks nothing better than to be in my company or that of my wicked, divine friends, and I'm vastly tickled by the compliment. He's virgin, about eight foot tall, and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge

...also took for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nations political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.