Top 100 John le Carré Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”

— John le Carré

2. “I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.”

— John le Carré

3. “There’s one thing worse than change and that’s the status quo.”

— John le Carré

4. “Do you know what love is? I’ll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.”

— John le Carré

5. “Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.”

— John le Carré

6. “To possess another language is to possess another soul.”

— John le Carré

7. “Blackmail is more effective than bribery.”

— John le Carré

8. “By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.”

— John le Carré

9. “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 Carré

10. “Multi-billion-dollar multinational corporations view the exploitation of the world’s sick and dying as a sacred duty to their shareholders.”

— John le Carré

11. “It’s death, that’s what I’m suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.”

— John le Carré

12. “The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.”

— John le Carré

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

13. “The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.”

— John le Carré

14. “A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul.”

— John le Carré

15. “The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.”

— John le Carré

16. “There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.”

— John le Carré

17. “People are very secretive – secret even from themselves.”

— John le Carré

18. “It’s the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?”

— John le Carré

19. “The pharmaceutical corporations are engaged in the systematic corruption of the medical profession, country by country.”

— John le Carré

20. “In every operation there is an above the line and a below the line. Above the line is what you do by the book. Below the line is how you do the job.”

— John le Carré

21. “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 Carré

22. “When a problem threatens to engulf you, there’s nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.”

— John le Carré

23. “The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It’s just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.”

— John le Carré

24. “There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.”

— John le Carré

25. “There will be no war, but in the pursuit of principle no stone will be left standing.”

— John le Carré

26. “I’ve got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I’d give this one a twang.”

— John le Carré

27. “I was the British spy who had come out of the woodwork and told it how it really was, and anything I said to the contrary only enforced the myth. And since I was writing for a public hooked on Bond and desperate for the antidote, the myth stuck.”

— John le Carré

28. “Home’s where you go when you run out of homes.”

— John le Carré

29. “The only reward for love is the experience of loving.”

— John le Carré

30. “Jesus Christ only had twelve, you know, and one of them was a double.”

— John le Carré

31. “A committee is an animal with four back legs.”

— John le Carré

32. “I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn’t. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one’s aims are, that’s the trouble, specially if you’re British.”

— John le Carré

33. “After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.”

— John le Carré

34. “Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.”

— John le Carré

35. “God is in his Heaven and the first night was a wow.”

— John le Carré

36. “It’s easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.”

— John le Carré

37. “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 Carré

38. “Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong.”

— John le Carré

Featured in: Strong Quotes

39. “Without a pen in my hand I can’t think.”

— John le Carré

40. “All power corrupts but some must govern.”

— John le Carré

41. “A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. You can’t alter his power over you. You can’t alter what you love or owe. And it’s too late to ask him for his absolution. He has beaten you all ways.”

— John le Carré

42. “No problem exists in isolation, one must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn.”

— John le Carré

43. “You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it’s not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.”

— John le Carré

44. “I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.”

— John le Carré

45. “I mean, you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?”

— John le Carré

46. “Cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a departmental canteen.”

— John le Carré

47. “I’ve always had difficulties with female characters.”

— John le Carré

48. “Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided.”

— John le Carré

49. “Let’s all pretend to be someone else, and then perhaps we’ll find out who we are.”

— John le Carré

50. “Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.”

— John le Carré