Artemis Eclectica

“[The FBI offices]: Antiseptic white tiles shone everywhere. Workmen were always busy, constantly repainting, cleaning, and polishing. The obsession with hygiene reeked of an unclean mind.”
― Peter Wright, Spy Catcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer

“Nature’s accidents are the universe’s way of throwing chance into a system which would die of too much orderliness. Hurricanes, droughts, floods, volcanic eruptions are all Mother Nature’s way of stirring up the pot to prevent stagnation and putrefaction.
A world without them would be a world of death. Floods, fires, eruptions, earthquakes all destroy and renew, kill and create, demolish and replant.
So too riots, revolutions and wars are societies’ ways of throwing chance into their systems, which are dying of too much orderliness. And like nature’s eruptions, these too destroy and renew, kill and create, demolish and replant.
And so too with individuals. Human beings need in their lives earthquakes and floods and riots and revolutions, or we grow as rigid and unmoving as corpses.”
― Luke Rhinehart

“For five years we bugged and burgled our way across London at the State's behest, while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way.”
― Peter Wright, Spy Catcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer

“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