And meanwhile, don’t think that Africans are disposed to corruption where we are not, so to speak. Actually, most of the corruption that has taken pl… - John le Carré

What the hell do you think spies are? Model philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They’re not. They’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me, little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants, playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong? (from a clip from the film adaptation of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, starring Richard Burton as Alec Leamas, an alcoholic cynical British spy)

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.

“Look,” he said. “We talk academic here, you know, wear academic dress and hold high table dinners in the Common Room; we have long graces in Latin that none of us can translate. We go to the Abbey and the wives sit in the hencoop in their awful hats. But it’s a charade. It means nothing.