"And your wife, she's in the pink and so on?" His expressions were also boyish. "Very bonny, thank you," said Smiley, trying gallantly to respond i… - John le Carré

"There are always a dozen reasons for doing nothing," Ann liked to say — it was a favourite apologia, indeed, for many of her misdemeanours. "There is only one reason for doing something. And that's because you want to." Or have to? Ann would furiously deny it: coercion, she would say, is just another word for doing what you want; or for not doing what you are afraid of.

I can’t understand that Blair has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under false pretenses has committed the ultimate sin. I think that a war in which we refuse to accept the body count of those that we kill is also a war of which we should be ashamed. We’ve always got to be careful of that. I think that — I wasn’t speaking as a prophet, I was just speaking as an angry citizen, I suppose. I think it’s true that we’ve caused irreparable damage in the Middle East. I think we shall pay for it for a long time.

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.