Absolute Friends Quotes

“There will be no war, but in the pursuit of principle no stone will be left standing. ”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“With people you see in them what you already know.”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“He has his chin on his chest and his eyes down. He is thinking of his new baby, his new novel, tomorrow's dance contest. He is thinking of everything except what he is thinking about. ”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“Outside the school's walls the Swinging Sixties are in full cry, but inside them the band of Empire plays on. Twice-daily chapel services praise the school's war dead to the detriment of its living, value the white man above lesser breeds, and preach chastity to boys who can find sexual stimulation in a Times editorial.”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“The easiest and cheapest trick for any leader is to take his country to war on false pretenses.”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“There comes a moment for all of us when our childhood ceases to be an excuse. In your case, I would say that, as with many English, the moment is somewhat delayed.”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“Any acts of protest currently performed by the Left only legitimize the rightist conspiracy that we are forced to call democracy. Our very existence as radicals underpins the authority of our enemies. Bonn’s military-industrial junta has strapped West Germany so tight to the American war wagon that we shall never be able to raise a finger against its atrocities.”
― John Le Carré, Absolute Friends

“Our movement was inspired not by the will of the oppressed classes but by the liberal guilt of the affluent.”
― John Le Carré, Absolute Friends

“With a child’s wonder, he examines the eternal spire of the Church of the Holy Ghost carved against the evening sky. What would it be like really and absolutely to believe? Like Zara. Like Mustafa. Like Jay Rourke’s chums. To know, really and absolutely know, that there’s a Divine Being not set in time or space who reads your thoughts better than you ever did, and probably before you even have them? To believe that God sends you to war, God bends the path of bullets, decides which of his children will die, or have their legs blown off, or make a few hundred million on Wall Street, depending on today’s Grand Design?”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“And let us both blindly serve our Queen and country, notwithstanding the fact that both are wholly owned subsidiaries of the one great Hyperpower in the Sky. Agreed?”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“In this respect he embodies what Mundy considers the least attractive characteristic of both our Western leaders and their spokesmen: a levitational self-belief that nimbly transcends the realities of human suffering.”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“I am an artist of the unobserved life.”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“he will expect nothing of life but life itself.”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“It’s called preemptive naïveté, and it rests on the assumption that everyone in the world would like to live in Dayton, Ohio, under one god, no prizes for guessing whose god that is.”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“I’m not paid to have a conscience, I’m paid to find new ways to fuck up the planet.”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“Their one aim is to perpetuate the insane concept of limitless expansion on a limited planet, with permanent conflict as its desired outcome. And their product is the zero-educated robot known otherwise as the corporate executive.”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“marks of dignity and erudition.”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“It was an old colonial oil war dressed up as a crusade for Western life and liberty, and it was launched by a clique of war-hungry Judeo-Christian geopolitical fantasists who hijacked the media and exploited America’s post-9/11 psychopathy.”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed. Then we have a war. This war.”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“what is conviction? How do we identify it? How can we know that we should be guided by it? Is it to be found in the heart, or in the intellect? And what if it is only to be found in the one and not the other?”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“According to our anarchist writers, world conflict should lead to creative chaos. If such chaos is intelligently exploited, a free society will emerge. But when I looked about me, I was forced to accept that the preconditions of creative chaos did not exist, neither did the intelligent exploiters. Chaos presupposes a vacuum of power, yet bourgeois power was gaining everywhere, and so was the military might of America, for whom West Germany was by now the arsenal and craven ally in the world war that appeared inevitable. As to the intelligent exploiters, they were too busy making profits and driving Mercedes cars to avail themselves of the opportunities we had created for them.”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“We cannot live in a bubble, Mr. Mundy. Comfortable ignorance is not a solution. In German student societies that I was not permitted to join, they made a toast: ‘Better to be a salamander, and live in the fire.’” After”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends

“To possess another language, Charlemagne tells us, is to possess another soul.”
― John le Carré, Absolute Friends