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

More quotes by John le Carre

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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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A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
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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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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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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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Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces, and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time, in our considered view, that you were present at certain other crucial moments in your history.
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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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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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I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
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Every writer knows he is spurious every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
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I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn't. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one's aims are, that's the trouble, specially if you're British.
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I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
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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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I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton
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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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In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs.
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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.
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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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Agents of disruption, subversion, sabotage and disinformation tunnelers and smugglers, listeners and forgers, trainers and recruiters and talent spotters and couriers and watchers and seducers, assassins and balloonists, lip readers and disguise artists.
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The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.
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