Western teaching institutions that refuse to acknowledge today's taboos are by definition subversive. Tell the new zealots of Washington that in the making of Israel a monstrous human crime was commit...
We have to live without sympathy, don’t we? That’s impossible, of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren’t like that really. I mean … one can’t be out in the cold all the tim...
We cannot live in a bubble, Mr. Mundy. Comfortable ignorance is not a solution. In German student societies that I was not permitted to join, they made a toast: ‘Better to be a salamander, and live in...
Was anyone else mentioned?' 'Esterhase,' Jim snapped, in the same taut tone. 'Bloody man wanted to know how anyone could trust a Hungarian.
Tomorrow was created yesterday.......And by the day before yesterday, too. TO IGNORE HISTORY IS TO IGNORE THE WOLF AT THE DOOR.
To possess another language, Charlemagne tells us, is to possess another soul.
To Tabitha, these are facts of history. For those of us who endured them, they are a time of despair, bewilderment and frustration.
Those who are treated as pariahs become pariahs—just as, to quote Auden, those to whom evil is done do evil in return.
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...
They would expect him to be afraid; for his service pursued traitors as the eye of God followed Cain across the desert.
They had met at oxford; she had taken a better degree than Avery. But somehow marriage had made her childish; dependence had become an attitude, as if she had given him something irredeemable, and wer...
There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.
The ground on which you once stood is cut away. You have become a citizen of No Man’s Land. I send you my greetings.-- the closing lines of Smiley's letter to Karla persuading him to defect.
The classified cat watches from the kitchen window.
Smiley presented an odd figure to his fellow passengers – a little fat man, rather gloomy, suddenly smiling, ordering a drink. The young, fair-haired man beside him examined him closely out of the cor...
Smiley himself was one of those solitaires who seem to have come into the world fully educated at the age of eighteen. Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession. The byways of espionage are...
Look, we are getting to be old men, and we've spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another's systems... Don't you think it's time to recognise that there is as little worth on your side a...
It was from us they learnt the secret of life: that we grow old without growing wise. They realized that nothing happened when we grew up: no blinding light on the road to Damascus, no sudden feeling...
If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out. Oscar Wilde
Hotel’s full up, I’m afraid, Mr. Roper, Jonathan rehearsed in another last-ditch effort to fend off the inevitable. Herr Meister is desolated. A temporary clerk has made an unpardonable error. However...