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.

The longing we have to communicate cleanly and directly with people is always obstructed by qualifications and often with concern about how our messages will be received.

I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.

People are very secretive - secret even from themselves.

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 never get to the centre of things.

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

The pharmaceutical corporations are engaged in the systematic corruption of the medical profession, country by country