John le Carre Quotes

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.

The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.

The better day, the worse deed.

I love that Barry Seal is working for the CIA, and he's an awful liar. It just goes to how honest this character is at the end of the day, even as he rips off the country and the world to the tune of becoming one of the wealthiest men in America. There's an innate honesty, a purity to him.

The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.

The Gates of Hell have been opened in Iraq.

If women and children have cruelly and needlessly suffered, if without reason cities have been wrecked, the world should know that.

The more sin is rationalized, the greater the possibility of destruction by Satan's wolves.

I like writing about the evil lurking in apparently good people.

Falsehood falsehood cures

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day and the best at murder are those who preach against it and the best at hate are those who preach love and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

Once you look past the hype, actors are nothing more than fugitives from reality who specialize in contradiction: we are both children and hardened adults—wide-eyed pupils and jaded working stiffs.

today's children are the first generation to grow up in a world that has the power to destroy itself.

The most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.

In the days when hyenas of hate suckle the babes of men, and jackals of hypocrisy pimp their mothers’ broken hearts, may children not look to demons of ignorance for hope.

Pure by impure is not seen.

Land mines, torture equipment, cluster bombs, chemical weapons are weapons designed to inflict pain and death on human beings. Most victims are civilians, women and children. How can arms manufacturers, weapons designers, plant managers, politicians, who have families of their own whom they love, be so insensitive when it comes to the suffering of other human beings?

When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people's tricks.

For we have thought the longer thoughts And gone the shorter way. And we have danced to devils' tunes, Shivering home to pray; To serve one master in the night, Another in the day.

Dear Brothers and Sisters, Never resort to war! Never war! Above all, I think of all the children who are robbed of their hope for a better life and a decent future. Killed children, wounded children, mutilated children, orphans, children who play with remnants of war, instead of toys. Children who don't know how to smile. Please stop! I ask you with all my heart. It's time to stop. Stop it please!

He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in.

I remember when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the program which I most desired to see was the one described as ‘The Boneless Wonder’. My parents judged that the spectacle would be too demoralizing and revolting for my youthful eye and I have waited fifty years, to see The Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.

What can rulers, nobility and all the lords of the earth say to justify the horrible killing and maiming of twenty or thirty million valuable men who a short while ago ploughed, dug, wove, built, guided the traffic of the world, took their pleasure, loved their fellows, cherished their families, and feared naught?

War is like night, she said. It covers everything.

I must confess that I am deeply troubled. I fear that human beings are intent upon acting out a vast deathwish and that it lies with us now to make every effort to promote resistance to the insanity and brutality of policies which encompass the extermination of hundreds of millions of human beings.