"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
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"History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.“
-John le Carre
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"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
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"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
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"The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead."
-John le Carre
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"If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing."
-John le Carre
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"Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news."
-John le Carre
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"Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers."
-Carlos Fuentes
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"If I had been elected president in 1948, history would be vastly different. I believe we would have stemmed the growth of Big Government, which had begun with the New Deal and culminated with the Great Society."
-Strom Thurmond
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"For most of our history, Americans enjoyed both liberty and security from foreign threats."
-Harry Browne
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"There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history. It is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations."
-Claude Vorilhon
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"This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry?"
-Azar Nafisi
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"What would be the nicest thing I could say about Newt Gingrich? He may be one of the great supporters of the humanities, because you have people who don't want to study the social sciences, because it's not profitable, and now Newt, as the highest-paid historian in American history, may be an encouragement to people to study history."
-Barney Frank
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