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A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.

John le Carre

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John le Carre
Age: 89 †
Born: 1931
Born: October 19
Died: 2020
Died: December 12
Actor
Film Producer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Spy
Writer
Sweetwater
Texas
David John Moore Cornwell
David Cornwell
John le Carre
Really
Legitimate
Think
Nowhere
Thinking
Whereas
People
Philosophical
Doubt
Middle
Courses
Course
Posture

More quotes by John le Carre

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Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.
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All power corrupts but some must govern.
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Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
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Cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a departmental canteen.
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Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
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What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.
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When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.
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Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
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Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.
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I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.
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A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. You can't alter his power over you. You can't alter what you love or owe. And it's too late to ask him for his absolution. He has beaten you all ways.
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Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
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I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.
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I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
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I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
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Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.
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The greatest threat to mankind comes from the renunciation of individual scruple in favor of institutional denominators. . . . Real heroism lies, as it always will, not in conformity or even patriotism, but in acts of solitary moral courage. Which, come to think of it, is what we used to admire in our Christian savior
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Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee. Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us. We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within. We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived.
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I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end.
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Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces, and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time, in our considered view, that you were present at certain other crucial moments in your history.
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