Novelists From England

"I think that if anything has happened to Europe since 1945 that defines it, it is collectively Europeans do not believe in war anymore, until it comes as an absolute last resort, and then they’re going to do it rather badly. The United States, I think, still sees war as a necessary part of its existence.."

"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979 TV series)"

"I can’t understand that Blair has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under false pretenses has committed the ultimate sin. I think that a war in which we refuse to accept the body count of those that we kill is also a war of which we should be ashamed. We’ve always got to be careful of that. I think that — I wasn’t speaking as a prophet, I was just speaking as an angry citizen, I suppose. I think it’s true that we’ve caused irreparable damage in the Middle East. I think we shall pay for it for a long time."

"Because we are so unfamiliar with the motivation of the people we are dealing with, we are more afraid of them than we need to be."

"On one hand we go like hell for every terror cell we can find, we penetrate it, we destroy it. On the other hand, there is a much bigger need for a political solution."

"To operate an intelligence network against the Islamist terror is terribly difficult because they don't have a central command and control center such as we would understand. Therefore you cannot penetrate at the top and find out what will happen on the ground."

"In recent years, Union Bank of California, American Express Bank International, BankAtlantic and Wachovia have all been caught moving huge sums of drug money, but no one went to jail. The banks just admitted to criminal conduct and paid the government a cut of their profits."

"We were not faced (in the cold war) in a conflict with people who are prepared to die for their cause. We weren't in conflict with people whose idea is to kill as many as they could."

"In the war on terror we did everything wrong that we could have done."

"Those critics don’t read their own newspapers, and nor perhaps have they noticed that a former head of MI5, our security service, who was translated to the House of Lords, was recently denied the senior post on a security committee on account of her connections with oligarchs in the Ukraine... supposedly connected with criminal conspiracy."

"You can't make war against terror. Terror is a technique of battle. It's a tactic that has been employed since time immemorial. You can conduct clandestine action against terrorists, and that must be done."

"It was the other music that he was hearing: the feeling that, while she was telling him one story, he was listening to a different one, and so was she."

"'Findley was not quite a character, thank you!' Frau Ellenberger retorted furiously. 'He wasn't a character at all. Mr Findley was assembled entirely from characteristics stolen from other people!'"

"The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing."

"There are some Arabs who think that the Germans did the right thing by the Jews. This makes it easy to recruit Arab terrorist."

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

"If I could generalize about my work in intelligence in those days, for better or worse, we counted ourselves an elite with a very considerable responsibility: to speak truth to power, like good journalists, that whatever we came upon, however offensive it was to those in power, we told it straight."

"Nothing in life... even a few broken bones, is without its reward."

"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011 film)"

"Peace, gentlemen, it is well known, does not come of its own accord, and neither does freedom. Peace has enemies. Peace must be won by the sword."

"The friends of my friends are my friends."

"Why is it that so many men of small stature have more courage than men of size?"

"Never trade a secret, you'll always get the short end of the bargain."

"If you're in a hole, don't dig, they say."

"When you assimilate, you choose."

"We were both hybrids: I by birth, he by education. We had both taken too many steps away from the country that had borne us to belong anywhere with ease."

"Elections are a Western jerk-off."

"The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press."

"The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world’s poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions."

"America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War."

"Savages...are by nature rash. They have no middle gear. The middle gear of any man is self-discipline."

"Tessa Quayle: Sir, I’ve just got one question. I just wondered: Whose map is Britain using when it completely ignores the United Nations and decides to invade Iraq? Or do you think it’s more diplomatic to bend the will of a superpower and politely take part in Vietnam the sequel? Justin Quayle: Well, I can’t speak for Sir Bernard. Tessa Quayle: Oh, I thought that’s why you were here. Justin Quayle: I mean, diplomats have to go where they’re sent. Tessa Quayle: So do Labradors. Justin Quayle: Ouch. Well, I think that, no, Sir Bernard would no doubt argue that when peaceful means are exhausted, then - Tessa Quayle: Exhausted? Mr. Quayle, they’re not exactly exhausted, are they? I mean, they’re just — they’re just — no, they are just lying in the way of the tanks. No, let’s face it: We’ve taken 60 years to build up this international organization called the United Nations, which is meant to avoid wars, and now we just blow it up because our car is running out of petrol."

"Luck's just another word for destiny...either you make your own or you're screwed."

"No problem exists in isolation, one must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn."

"[She] reports that [the company] recently donated fifty million dollars to a major U.S. teaching hospital, plus salaries and expenses for three top clinicians and six research assistants. Corruption of university Common Room affiliations is even easier: professorial chairs, biotech labs, research foundations, etc. 'Unbought scientific opinion is increasingly hard to find.'"

"“And this is a prison for spies?” Liz persisted. “It is a prison for those who fail to recognize Socialist reality; for those who think they have the right to err; for those who slow down the march. Traitors,” she concluded briefly. “But what have they done?” “We cannot build communism without doing away with individualism. You cannot plan a great building if some swine builds his sty on your site.”"

"“Then the people in this prison are intellectuals?” The woman smiled. “Yes,” she said, “they are reactionaries who call themselves progressive: they defend the individual against the state. Do you know what Khrushchev said about the counter-revolution in Hungary?” Liz shook her head. She must show interest, she must make the woman talk. “He said it would never have happened if a couple of writers had been shot in time.”"

"The English! The rich have eaten your future and your poor have given them the food—that’s what’s happened to the English."

"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. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs? I’d have killed Mundt if I could, I hate his guts; but not now. It so happens that they need him. They need him so that the great moronic mass that you admire can sleep soundly in their beds at night. They need him for the safety of ordinary, crummy people like you and me."

"A man who lives apart, not to others but alone, is exposed to obvious psychological dangers. 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."

"I am afraid that as a nation we tend to over-organise. Abroad that passes for efficiency."

"“This is a war,” Leamas replied. “It’s graphic and unpleasant because it’s fought on a tiny scale, at close range; fought with a wastage of innocent life sometimes, I admit. But it’s nothing, nothing at all besides other wars—the last or the next.”"

"Sometimes she thought Alec was right—you believed in things because you needed to; what you believed in had no value of its own, no function."

"I should have guessed you’d never have the guts to do your own dirty work, Fiedler. It’s typical of your rotten little half-country and your squalid little Service that you get big uncle to do your pimping for you. You are not a country at all, you’re not a government, you’re a fifth-rate dictatorship of political neurotics."

"He possessed, however, that persistent inquisitiveness which for journalists and lawyers is an end in itself."

"“Alec, what do you believe in? Don’t laugh—tell me.” She waited and at last he said: “I believe an eleven bus will take me to Hammersmith. I don’t believe it’s driven by Father Christmas.”"

"If they do not know what they want, how can they be so certain they are right?"

"Smiley's People (1982 TV series)"

"“It is not fashionable to quote Stalin but he said once, ‘half a million liquidated is a statistic, but one man killed in a traffic accident is a national tragedy.’ He was laughing, you see, at the bourgeois sensitivities of the mass. He was a cynic. But what he meant is still true: a movement which protects itself against counter-revolution can hardly stop at the exploitation—or the elimination, Leamas—of a few individuals. It is all one, we have never pretended to be wholly just in the process of rationalising society. Some Roman said it, didn’t he, in the Christian Bible—it is expedient that one man should die for the benefit of many.” “I expect so,” Leamas replied wearily. “Then what do you think? What is your philosophy?” “I just think the whole lot of you are bastards,” said Leamas savagely."

"A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world."