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Tyranny is like the electric wiring in an old house. A tyrant dies, the new tyrant takes possession, and all he has to do is drop the switch.

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
Takes
Wiring
Dies
Tyrant
House
Switch
Like
Tyrants
Electric
Drop
Tyranny
Possession

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What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?
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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.
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I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
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We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.
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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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If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
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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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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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Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
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I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton
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When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.
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...also took for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nations political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.
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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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Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
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I think that all writers feel alienated. ... I know that I do. ... I still feel, as I think most creative people do, absolutely isolated.
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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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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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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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All power corrupts but some must govern.
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I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
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