Morris Nelms

“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? I’d have killed Mundt if I could, I hate his guts; but not now. It so happens that they need him. They need him so that the great moronic mass that you admire can sleep soundly in their beds at night. They need him for the safety of ordinary, crummy people like you and me.”
― John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

“Young Tchitcherine was the one who brought up political narcotics. Opiates of the people.

Wimpe smiled back. An old, old smile to chill even the living fire in Earth’s core. "Marxist dialectics? That’s not an opiate, eh?"

"It’s the antidote."

"No." It can go either way. The dope salesman may know everything that’s ever going to happen to Tchitcherine, and decide it’s no use—or, out of the moment’s velleity, lay it right out for the young fool.

"The basic problem," he proposes, "has always been getting other people to die for you. What’s worth enough for a man to give up his life? That’s where religion had the edge, for centuries. Religion was always about death. It was used not as an opiate so much as a technique—it got people to die for one particular set of beliefs about death. Perverse, natürlich, but who are you to judge? It was a good pitch while it worked. But ever since it became impossible to die for death, we have had a secular version—yours. Die to help History grow to its predestined shape. Die knowing your act will bring will bring a good end a bit closer. Revolutionary suicide, fine. But look: if History’s changes are inevitable, why not not die? Vaslav? If it’s going to happen anyway, what does it matter?"

"But you haven’t ever had the choice to make, have you."

"If I ever did, you can be sure—"

"You don’t know. Not till you’re there, Wimpe. You can’t say."

"That doesn’t sound very dialectical."

"I don’t know what it is."

"Then, right up to the point of decision," Wimpe curious but careful, "a man could still be perfectly pure . . ."

"He could be anything. I don’t care. But he’s only real at the points of decision. The time between doesn’t matter."

"Real to a Marxist."

"No. Real to himself."

Wimpe looks doubtful.

"I've been there. You haven't.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“...to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale