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e008a06
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Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through it
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Eric Ambler |
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99c110d
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Yet, when these facts are seen side by side with other facts in the case, it is difficult not to become lost in superstitious awe. Their very absurdity seems to prohibit the use of the words 'chance' and 'coincidence.' For the sceptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman Law, it is administered with sub-human inefficiency.
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fortune
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Eric Ambler |
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8313e5e
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Reality is always so obstructive.
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Eric Ambler |
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d303f0e
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Good' did not triumph. 'Evil' did not triumph. The two resolved, destroyed each other and created new 'evils', new 'goods' which slew each other in their turn.
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Eric Ambler |
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17c8880
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In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner.
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politics
mediocrity
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Eric Ambler |
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89590de
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The important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.
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assassin-s-creed
assassination
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Eric Ambler |
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6439c6c
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A person who searched rooms, brandished pistols, dangled promises of half a million franc fees for nameless services and then wrote instructions to Polish spies might reasonably be regarded with suspicion. But suspicion of what?
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Eric Ambler |
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319a274
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They don't talk the same language as us. I don't mean that they don't speak English, but that their minds are different. They're like animals, and because I hate the sight and sound of them, and because you're a Britisher, I'm telling you to get out now while the going's good.
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Eric Ambler |
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46232bf
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It was the power of Business, not the deliberations of statesman, that shaped the destinies of nations. The Foreign Ministers of the great powers might make the actual declarations of their Governments' policies; but it was the Big Business men, the bankers and their dependents, the arms manufacturers, the oil companies, the big industrialists, who determined what those policies should be.
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Eric Ambler |
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e2ad11a
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A man's features, the bone structure and the tissue which covers it, are the product of a biological process; but his face he creates for himself. It is a statement of his habitual emotional attitude; the attitude which his desires need for fulfilment and which his fears demand for their protection of prying eyes. He wears it like a devil mask; a device to evoke in others the emotions complementary to his own. If he is afraid, then he must ..
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Eric Ambler |
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d37b587
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I tell you this, my friend; all men are cowards. They dislike a fact except when it is so wrapped up in lies and sentiments that the sharp edge of it cannot hurt them. When a man tells the truth he his, depend upon it, a dangerous man.
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Eric Ambler |
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c29f449
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In a dying civilisation, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician but of the man with the best beside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance. Yet there remains one sort of political prestige that may still be worn with a certain pathetic dignity; it is that given to the liberal-minded leader of a party of conflicting doctrinaire extremists. His dignity is that of all doomed men: for, whe..
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mediocrity
political-extremism
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Eric Ambler |
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48737b7
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We can learn only in the expectation of life. Europe is too preoccupied with its destruction to concern itself with such things. A condemned man is interested only in himself, the passage of hours and such intimations of immortality as he can conjure from the recesses of his mind.
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Eric Ambler |
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3d98f13
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A man's features, the bone structure and the tissue which covers it, are the product of a biological process; but his face he creates for himself. It is a statement of his habitual emotional attitude; the attitude which his desires need for fulfilment and which his fears demand for their protection of prying eyes. He wears it like a devil mask; a device to evoke in others the emotions complementary to his own. If he is afraid, then he must ..
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Eric Ambler |
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282fc9e
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He says that it was people who were safe and well fed who invented good and evil so that they would not have to worry about the people who were hungry and unsafe. What a man does depends on what he needs. It is simple. You are not a murderer. You say that murder is evil. Jose would say that you are as much a murderer as Landru or Weidmann and that it is just that fortune has not made it necessary for you to murder anyone. Someone once told ..
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Eric Ambler |
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1b516cd
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I am tempted to find reason and justice in the fact that he died as violently and indecently as he lived. But that is too ingenuous a way out. It does not explain Dimitrios; it only apologizes for him. Special sorts of conditions must exist for the creation of the special sort of criminal that he typified...all I do know is that while might is right, while chaos and anarchy masquerade as order and enlightenment, those conditions will obtain..
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war
psychology
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Eric Ambler |
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af56eaa
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We are trespassing on your hospitality
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Eric Ambler |
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836fc15
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but when you have been nourishing your soul on expectation, reality is apt to be disappointing.
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Eric Ambler |
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6efff85
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Governments had risen and fallen; men and women had worked, had starved, had made speeches, had fought, had been tortured, had died. Hope had come and gone, a fugitive in the scented bosom of illusion. Men had learned to sniff the heady dreamstuff of the soul and wait impassively while the lathes turned the guns for their destruction. And through those years, Dimitrios had lived and breathed and come to terms with his strange gods.
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Eric Ambler |
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c03eae6
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Tweeds, he soon found, are not in warm weather the ideal clothes for mountain climbing, for that was what his progress soon became. The track grew almost precipitous and he was still further hindered by the loose surface and his package of food and wine. He had been climbing for half an hour when he stopped, ate his lunch, drank his wine and smoked a pipe. Some forty minutes later, much refreshed and free of encumbrance, he continued the as..
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Eric Ambler |
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a4de266
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For instance, Visser, the Dutchman, had sold German machine guns to the Chinese, spied for the Japanese and served a term of imprisonment for killing a coolie in Batavia. He was not an easy man to handle.
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Eric Ambler |
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c1defd0
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Ballet is merely a new rationalization of society's instinctive movement towards self-destruction. A dance of death for the Gadarene swine.
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eric ambler |
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13108f6
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International big business has made revolutions before now to safeguard its interests. At one time it made them ... in the name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Now, with Socialism to fight, it makes them in the name of Law and Order and Sound Finance. Assassination? If an assassination is going to be good for business, then there will be an assassination.
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capitalism
revolution
regime-change
self-interest
spy
big-business
betrayal
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Eric Ambler |
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de271d7
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All over Europe, all over the world, men were spying. While in government offices other men were tabulating the results of the spies' labours; thicknesses of armour-plating, elevation angles of guns, muzzles velocities, details of fire control mechanisms and range-finders, fuse efficiencies, details of fortifications, positions of ammunition stores, disposition of key factories, landmarks for bombers. The world was getting ready to go to wa..
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Eric Ambler |
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bcefdc6
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At this point doubts started to creep in. One was always reading of young men running away to sea, or people shipping as deck-hands and working their passages. There seemed to be no special qualifications needed. No ropes had to be spliced. No rigging had to be climbed. All you did was paint the anchor, chip rust off the deck plating and say 'aye, aye, sir', when addressed by an officer. It was a tough life and you met tough men. There were..
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Eric Ambler |
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090ab4f
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It would be good now, I thought, to be in Paris. The afternoon city heat would have gone. It would be good to sit under the trees near the marionette theatre. It would be quiet there now. There would be no one there but a student or two reading. There you could listen to the rustle of leaves unconscious of the pains of humanity in labour, of a civilisation hastening to its own destruction. There, away from this brassy sea and blood-red eart..
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Eric Ambler |
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32d19dc
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But it was useless to try to explain him in terms of Good and Evil. They were no more than baroque abstractions. Good Business and Bad Business were the elements of the new theology. Dimitrios was not evil. He was logical and consistent; as logical and consistent in the European jungle as the poison gas called Lewisite and the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town.
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Eric Ambler |
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ed2336d
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It was Napoleon who said that one spy in the right place was worth twenty thousand men in the field. He was speaking of his own spy, Schul-meister, a man of amazing courage, skill, and loyalty. But when the time came to reward Schulmeister for his services it was the same Napoleon who refused him the Legion of Honor for which he had been recommended, and the same Napoleon who commented that money was the only suitable reward for
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Eric Ambler |
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9b89963
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In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest politician, but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance.
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politics
mediocrity
decline
decline-of-civilization
fin-de-siècle
populism
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Eric Ambler |
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630089b
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If such things were not so dangerous one would laugh. But one recognizes the technique. Such propaganda always begins with words, but soon it proceeds to deeds. When there are no facts to support lies, facts must be made.
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propaganda
warnings-about-society
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Eric Ambler |
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b337624
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As for the description, it might, like most other tabulated descriptions, have fitted tens of thousands of men. With most persons, recognition, even of an intimate, was based on the perception of vague, half-observed quantities which together formed a caricature significant more in its relation to the observer than to the observed. A short man, conscious of his lack of height, would describe a man of medium height as tall. For the ordinary ..
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Eric Ambler |
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e072fee
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Vociferous international audiences thronged the streets. Actually, it is nothing more nor less than an Italian version of Birmingham.
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Eric Ambler |
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4bee1b3
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in to the pier,
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Eric Ambler |
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34fdc46
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For the sceptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as a superhuman Law, it is administered with subhuman inefficiency.
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Eric Ambler |
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9f91add
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Nuit de Petits Gars! Numero soixante-neuf! Cinq francs la bouteille.
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Eric Ambler |
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8fee12b
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The truth about many of our great traditional patriots is ugly or ludicrous; but it makes no difference. They are defended angrily. National feeling in small states is always angry; it must be so, for its roots are in fear and self-doubt and for those things reason is no protection.
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Eric Ambler |
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399d502
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The duplicity of others must always be shocking when one is unconscious of one's own.
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self-awareness
duplicity
self-deception
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Eric Ambler |
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86378ca
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Banking!" Mathis was saying. "What is it but usury? Bankers are money lenders, usurers. But because they lend other people's money or money that does not exist, they have a pretty name. They are still usurers. Once, usury was a mortal sin and an abomination, and to be a usurer was to be a criminal for whom there was a prison cell. To-day the usurers are the gods of the earth and the only mortal sin is to be poor."
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Eric Ambler |
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5648b23
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Your international financier... has no political convictions. For him there is no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest. He believes in the survival of the fittest and the gospel of tooth and claw because he makes money by seeing that the weak die before they can become strong and that the law of the jungle remains the governing force in the affairs of the world. And he is all about us. Every city in the world knows him. ..
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capitalism
big-business
finance
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Eric Ambler |
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8cb46e9
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The pages of European history are, so to speak, bespattered with the records of Black Mondays and Black Thursdays. It may be that, in this twentieth century, almost daily acquaintance with large-scale catastrophe has deprived the custom of its point. Black and white have tended to merge into a drab grey.
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Eric Ambler |
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3f31e1c
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But you couldn't get away from danger! It was all about you, all the time. You could live in ignorance of it for years: you might go to the end of your days believing that some things couldn't possibly happen to you, that death could only come to you with the sweet reason of disease or an "act of God": but it was there just the same, waiting to make nonsense of all your comfortable ideas about your relations with time and chance, ready to r..
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Eric Ambler |
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0fd47fc
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Perhaps it is that I am old, but I find it extremely difficult to identify men with their ideas. I can dislike, even hate an idea, but the man who has it seems to be still a man.
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Eric Ambler |
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19be5f0
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Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through.
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Eric Ambler |
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2c67d8b
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What use is an honest lawyer when what you need is a dishonest one?
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Eric Ambler |