Quote

I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.

John le Carre

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Truth
Skillful
Power
Terribly
Think
Single
Thinking
Information
People
Greatest
Enemy
History
Perversion
Hands
Misuse

More quotes by John le Carre

Image
Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time.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.
John le Carre
Image
Home's where you go when you run out of homes.
John le Carre
Image
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
Image
Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
John le Carre
Image
I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
John le Carre
Image
You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.
John le Carre
Image
The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
John le Carre
Image
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
Image
All power corrupts but some must govern.
John le Carre
Image
It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
John le Carre
Image
The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.
John le Carre
Image
If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
John le Carre
Image
Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.
John le Carre
Image
The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.
John le Carre
Image
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.
John le Carre
Image
When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.
John le Carre
Image
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.
John le Carre
Image
It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.
John le Carre
Image
There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
John le Carre
Image
There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.
John le Carre