John le Carre Quotes About War

Quotes about: War

• During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

  John le Carre

  War, Literature, Shade

  "John le Carré at the NFT". Interview with Adrian Wootton, www.theguardian.com. October 5, 2002.

• It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn't notice. It wasn't weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was just man. Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we've had enough. It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes. And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they've had their day.

  John le Carre

  War, Army, Technology

  "The Secret Pilgrim". Book by John le Carré, www.huffingtonpost.com. 1990.

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

  John le Carre

  War, Principles, Stones

• Look... we're getting to be old men, and we've spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another's systems. I can see through Eastern values just as you can see through our Western ones. Both of us, I am sure, have experienced ad nauseam the technical satisfactions of this wretched war. But now your own side is going to shoot you. Don't you think it's time to recognise that there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine?

  John le Carre

  War, Men, Thinking

• For all the flailing and huffing and puffing, there is a kind of fatality about the process of war-making and the excuses we find for it, the consolation of belligerence in politics.

  John le Carre

  War, Huffing, Kind

• The cold war provided the perfect excuse for Western governments to plunder and exploit the Third World in the name of freedom; to rig its elections, bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants and, by every sophisticated means of persuasion and interference, stunt the emergence of young democracies in the name of democracy.

  John le Carre

  War, Mean, Government

• The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.

  John le Carre

  War, Long, Literature

  Interview with Adrian Wootton, www.theguardian.com. October 5, 2002.

• You can't make war against terror. Terror is a technique of battle. It's a tactic that has been employed since time immemorial. You can conduct clandestine action against terrorists, and that must be done.

  John le Carre

  War, Battle, Technique

  "The Book Show" with Ramona Koval, November 19, 2008.

• The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock on God. And God has very particular political opinions. God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America's Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.

  John le Carre

  Religious, War, Ideas

  "British Novelist John le Carré on the Iraq War, Corporate Power, the Exploitation of Africa and His New Novel, “Our Kind of Traitor”". Interview with Amy Goodman, www.democracynow.org. November 25, 2010.

• I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.

  John le Carre

  War, Cold, Witch

• America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.

  John le Carre

  War, Pigs, America

  "British Novelist John le Carré on the Iraq War, Corporate Power, the Exploitation of Africa and His New Novel, “Our Kind of Traitor”". "Democracy Now" with Amy Goodman, www.democracynow.org. November 25, 2010.

• In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.

  John le Carre

  War, Reality, Issues

• There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.

  John le Carre

  War, Fighting, Differences

  "The Book Show", Interview with Ramona Koval, Australian Broadcasting Commission Radio National, November 19, 2008.

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