Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by John le Carre (English Novelist)

David John Moore Cornwell (1931–2020,) pseudonym John Le Carré, was an English novelist. He is remembered for his unromanticized and sensitive spy novels, which often feature the British ‘anti-hero’ agent, George Smiley.

Born in Poole, Dorset, le Carré was educated at Berne University and at Oxford. He taught French and Latin for two years at Eton. During the 1950s and 1960s, he served for the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6.)

Le Carré left the service in 1964 to become a full-time writer. He took his alias in the early 1960s from a sign in a London shop window; his employer, the British Foreign Service, did not permit its agents to publish books under their own name, so he picked Le Carré.

Le Carré’s novels manifest the unglamorous side of diplomacy and espionage, describing a world of apathy, disorder, and selfish deceit. Le Carré investigates the morality of present-day diplomacy and timeworn jingoistic positions. His publications include The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963,) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974,) and A Most Wanted Man (2008.) Many of his works have been successfully filmed or televised.

Le Carré’s memoir is The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life (2016.) Rutgers University’s Myron J Aronoff wrote The Spy Novels of John le Carré (1998.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by John le Carre

Love is whatever you can still betray … Betrayal can only happen if you love.
John le Carre
Topics: Betrayal, One liners

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.
John le Carre

A committee is an animal with four back legs.
John le Carre
Topics: Committees

I don’t think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.
John le Carre

Ideologies have no heart of their own. They’re the whores and angels of our striving selves.
John le Carre

You ask can we ever trust the Bear?… I will give you several answers at once. The first is no, we can never trust the Bear. For one reason, the Bear doesn
John le Carre
Topics: Trust

For better or worse, I’ve been involved in the description of political conflict.
John le Carre
Topics: Conflict

The practice of deception is not particularly exacting. It is a facility most of us can acquire.
John le Carre

When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats.
John le Carre
Topics: World

Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-ight drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.
John le Carre
Topics: Home

History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.
John le Carre
Topics: History

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