Quote

Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time.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

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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
Littles
Perhaps
Blown
Back
Wind
Chooses
Better
Wasn
Loyal
Little
Modern
Date
Nothing
Days
Generation
Every
Moment
Forward
Men
Moments
Generations
Entrench
Time
Certain
Worth
Oaks

More quotes by John le Carre

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Everyone who is not happy must be shot.
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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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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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A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
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In every operation there is an above the line and a below the line. Above the line is what you do by the book. Below the line is how you do the job.
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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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When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.
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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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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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I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.
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I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I've sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That's the saddest thing of all, because they're locked up and no-one else can make them.
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Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
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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.
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Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.
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All power corrupts but some must govern.
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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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It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
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Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.
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I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
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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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