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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
Government
Mean
Benevolent
Ruthless
Opposition
Policy
Simply
Less

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It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
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As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.
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Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
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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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I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.
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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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Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.
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We've had enough. He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. We've had a bellyful, in fact. And like everyone who's had enough, said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, he wants more.
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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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I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.
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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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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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It struck him as a bit unfair that, at the age of eight, he should have manifested the same sense of solitude that haunted him at forty-three.
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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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The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
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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.
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It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.
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For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
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I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.
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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.
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