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I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.

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
Religions
Literature
Given
Great
Think
Thinking
Impertinent
Impunity
Blasphemy

More quotes by John le Carre

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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 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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Wives? she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, None active, as if wives were volcanoes.
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I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.
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When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.
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Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.
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Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time.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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Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
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Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
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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 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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Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
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All men are born free: just not for long.
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The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
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It struck him as a bit unfair that, at the age of eight, he should have manifested the same sense of solitude that haunted him at forty-three.
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If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
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There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.
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The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
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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 used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.
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