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

She had the experience to suffer with discretion.

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...

Ashe was typical of that strata of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he found resistance, retreat. Having himself...

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous

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.

Sometimes you do it to save face, thought Jerry, other times you just do it because you haven’t done your job unless you’ve scared yourself to death. Other times again, you go in order to...

Yes, dear Father. But has it ever occurred to you that by controlling [your feelings] you destroy them? How many times can we say sorry before we don’t feel sorry anymore?

Walking a short way back along the embankment, almost to where the cross stood, Smiley took another look at the bridge, as if to establish whether anything had changed, but clearly it had not, and...

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

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...

We’ve had enough.” He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. “We’ve had a bellyful, in fact.””And like everyone who’s had enough,” said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, “he wants...

I don’t break down,” she announced. “Got it?”He got it. He was already pulling back, looking ashamed of himself, but somehow he was still holding her wrist.”I never break down. I’m a lawyer.

You should have died when I killed you.

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. Those who watch suffering and...

He sees passion in her gray eyes, and it scares him as all passion scares him, his own included.

… in moments of crisis our thoughts do not run consecutively but rather sweep over us in waves or intuition and experience …

Afterwards Smiley always thought of that interview as a fan dance; a calculated progression of disclosures, each revealing different parts of a mysterious entity. Finally Steed-Asprey, who seemed to be Chairman, removed the last veil,...

Pain observed is journalistic pain. It’s diplomatic pain. It’s television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set.

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...

Let’s die of it before we’re too old.

Everyone who is not happy must be shot.

A man who lives a part, not to others but alone, is exposed to obvious psychological dangers. In itself the practice of deception is not particularly exacting. It is a matter of experience, a professional...

Look, we are getting to be old men, and we’ve spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another’s systems… Don’t you think it’s time to recognise that there is as little worth on...

All men are born free: just not for long.

The vertical manThough we value noneBut the horizontal one.

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....

Middle children weep longer than their brothers and sisters. Over her mother’s shoulder, stilling her pains and her injured pride, Jackie Lacon watched the party leave. First, two men she had not seen before: one...

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...

But despite such energetic mental exercise, the ghosts of time present would intrude and drive his dreams away. It was Ann who had robbed him of his peace, Ann who had once made the present...

There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one’s own generation.

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.

A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they’re nowhere.

Yet it’s not for want of future that I’m here, he thought. It’s for want of a present.

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

He had the nerve not to drink in a University where you proved your manhood by being drunk most of your first year.

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 and...

Urgent equals ephemeral, and ephemeral equals unimportant.

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...

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

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

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 at...

To dream in doctrines, how tidy!

She’s become a Russian again, he thought. When something works, she’s grateful. When it doesn’t work, it’s life.

Don’t give it to them all at once, make them work for it. Confuse them with detail, leave things out, go back on your tracks. Be testy, be cussed, be difficult. Drink like a fish;...

He knew how intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors, how weeks of patient work night and day could be cast aside by such a man

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’ is benevolent,...

society is unconcerned with the aftermath of sensation.

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...

They might have you, and they pay badly enough to guarantee you decent company.