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I mean, you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's policy is benevolent, can you now?

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
Ruthless
Opposition
Policy
Simply
Less
Government
Mean
Benevolent

More quotes by John le Carre

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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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I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
John le Carre
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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
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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
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Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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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
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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
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Luck's just another word for destiny... either you make your own or you're screwed.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
John le Carre
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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.
John le Carre
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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
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Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.
John le Carre
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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