Quotes from le carre john iii

Blackmail is more effective than bribery.

There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.

Home's where you go when you run out of homes.

I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.

It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

Each of us has only a quantum of compassion ... if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.

In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.

Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.

Survival ... is an infinite capacity for suspicion.

The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock on God. And God has very particular political opinions. God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America's Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.

By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.

A dead man is the worst enemy alive ... 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.

In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting; it is a matter of experience, of professional expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire.

There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.

What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?

God is in his Heaven and the first night was a wow.

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous.

There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.

A committee is an animal with four back legs.

A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.