134 quotes found
“It is said that men condemned to death are subject to sudden moments of elation; as if, like moths in the fire, their destruction were coincidental with attainment.”
“By what route the infant Hansen found his way to the Jesuits, the file did not relate. Perhaps the mother converted. Those were dark years still, and if expediency required it, she may have swallow...”
“Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.”
“There's no way out," he announced with satisfaction, "and no amount of wishful dreaming will produce one. The demon won't go back in its bottle, the face-off is for ever, the embrace gets tighter a...”
“This is a war," Lemas 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...”
“I would say that since the war, our methods-out and those of the opposition-have become much the same. I mean you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's 'policy...”
“By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.”
“Tyranny is like the electric wiring in an old house. A tyrant dies, the new tyrant takes possession, and all he has to do is drop the switch.”
“It is only when he speaks German, as now, that he allows himself to lament the enslavement of the world's downtrodden classes. "We cannot live in a bubble, Mr. Mundy. Comfortable ignorance is not a...”
“His intuition was luminous from the instant you met him. So was his intelligence. A lot of actors act intelligent, but Philip was the real thing: a shining, artistic polymath with an intelligence t...”
“Tessa distinguished absolutely between pain observed and pain shared. Pain observed is journalistic pain. It’s diplomatic pain. It’s television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set...”
“Wives?" she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, "None active," as if wives were vo...”
“Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee. Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us. We live on the edge...”
“He sees passion in her gray eyes, and it scares him as all passion scares him, his own included.”
“Some people are agents from birth, Monsignors -- he told them -- appointed to the work by the period of history, the place, and their own natural dispositions. In their cases, it was simply a quest...”
“She's become a Russian again, he thought. When something works, she's grateful. When it doesn't work, it's life.”
“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 comin...”
“I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,' Smiley went on, more lightly. 'Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the...”
“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 t...”
“If there's no sea-gull there's no meeting, Wicklow had said. No sea-gull means abort. That's my epitaph, thought Barley. 'There was no sea-gull, so he aborted.”
