A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. 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.
If you're growing up in a chaotic world without reason, your instinct is to become a performer and control the circumstances around you. You lead from weakness into strength; you have an undefended ba...
Shoes and a leather jacket. When Burr had
When we can't hurt our enemies, we hurt our friends.
What in Britain is called the Special Relationship, in Germany is called treason.
We pretend a lot of things aren't there. Or we pretend that other things are more important. That's how we survive.
They would know that inconsistency in human decision can make nonsense of the best-planned espionage approach; that cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentleme...
The Party knows more about us than we know ourselves,’ the woman replied.
Sometimes you do it to save face, thought Jerry, other times you just do it because you haven't done your job unless you've scared yourself to death. Other times again, you go in order to remind yours...
Put it this way, George, he suggested, when he had savoured the night air for a moment. You traveling on business, or for pleasure in this thing? Which is it?Smiley’s reply was also slow in coming, an...
Mas em diplomacia nada é duradouro, nada é absoluto e uma conspiração entre assassinos não é motivo para interromper o fluxo da conversa
Leninismo: la conveniencia de las alianzas transitorias.
It was simpler in those days. We could say they’d died for their country. We didn’t have to tell them the details; they didn’t expect that.
I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn't. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one's aims are, that's...
I know their unstinted devotion to the free-market economy, provided it's their freedom and somebody else's economy.
He’s going to save the world before he leaves it if it kills him.
Guns have their own silence. It is the silence of the dead to come.
But we progress, Your Graces. Inexorably we progress. Albeit at the blind man’s speed, as we tap-tap along in the dark.
Ashe, Kiever, Peters; that was a progression in quality, in authority, which to Leamas was axiomatic of the hierarchy of an intelligence network. It was also, he suspected, a progression in ideology....
And gradually it dawned on him, if a dawning can take place in total blackness, that his life has consisted of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in. And that what he needed to...