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When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats.
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
Superiors
Experts
Destroyed
Ignorance
World
Bureaucrats
Madmen
Sanity
Superior
More quotes by John le Carre
Those who are not with Mr. Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I'm dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam's downfall -- just not on Bush's terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.
John le Carre
The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
John le Carre
For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
John le Carre
History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.
John le Carre
Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.
John le Carre
I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
John le Carre
If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
John le Carre
As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.
John le Carre
What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?
John le Carre
If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
John le Carre
I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,' Smiley went on, more lightly. 'Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.
John le Carre
Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong.
John le Carre
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.
John le Carre
For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.
John le Carre
When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.
John le Carre