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212 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1963
“I know how these things go – all offensive operations. They have by-products, take sudden turns in unexpected directions. You think you’ve caught one fish and you find you’ve caught another.”
“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. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs?”
The rich have eaten your future and your poor have given them the food.
He met failure as one day he would probably meet death, with cynical resentment and the courage of a solitary.
Mundt's appearance was fully consistent with his temperament. He looked an athlete. His young face had a hard clean line and a frightening directness; it was barren of humor or fantasy. ... Leamas found no difficulty in recalling that Mundt was a killer. There was a coldness about him, a rigorous self-sufficiency which perfectly equipped him for the business of murder.
“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 all the time; one has to come in from the cold...d'you see what I mean?
I would say that since the war, our methods - ours 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, can you now?”
“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. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs?”