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

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.

If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.

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

People who've had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others.

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

Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.