The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

by John Le Carré

The novel’s merit, then—or its offense, depending where you stood—was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible.

how far can we go in the rightful defense of our Western values without abandoning them along the way?

Today, the same man, with better teeth and hair, and a much smarter suit, can be heard explaining away the catastrophic illegal war in Iraq, or justifying medieval torture techniques as the preferred means of interrogation in the twenty-first century, or defending the inalienable right of closet psychopaths to bear semiautomatic weapons and the use of unmanned drones as a risk-free method of assassinating one’s perceived enemies and anybody who has the bad luck to be standing near them.

Intelligence work has one moral law—it is justified by results.

They walked to her flat through the rain and they might have been anywhere—Berlin, London, any town where paving stones turn to lakes of light in the evening rain, and the traffic shuffles despondently through wet streets.

“If they do not know what they want, how can they be so certain they are right?”