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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.

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
Respectable
May
Cheat
Treasons
Every
Liars
Canteen
Watery
Resist
Cheats
Gentleman
Cabbage
Loyalty
Appalling
Criminals
Gentlemen
Moved

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Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
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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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Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
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I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
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America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
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There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.
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Love means having something to betray.
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Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
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The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
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Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishounorable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.
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What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?
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We've had enough. He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. We've had a bellyful, in fact. And like everyone who's had enough, said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, he wants more.
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More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
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As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.
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A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
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In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.
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The cold war provided the perfect excuse for Western governments to plunder and exploit the Third World in the name of freedom to rig its elections, bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants and, by every sophisticated means of persuasion and interference, stunt the emergence of young democracies in the name of democracy.
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For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
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The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It's just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.
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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.
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