The Secret Agent Quotes
"All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity—it is to destroy it."
"History is made by men, but they do not make it in their heads."
"The ideas that are born in their consciousness play an insignificant part in the march of events."
"History is dominated and determined by the tool and the production—by the force of economic conditions."
"Capitalism has made socialism, and the laws made by the capitalism for the protection of property are responsible for anarchism."
"No one can tell what form the social organisation may take in the future."
"The future is as certain as the past—slavery, feudalism, individualism, collectivism."
"This is the statement of a law, not an empty prophecy."
"The only thing that matters to us is the emotional state of the masses. Without emotion there is no action."
"The teaching propaganda be hanged. What the people knows does not matter, were its knowledge ever so accurate."
"The great capitalists devouring the little capitalists, concentrating the power and the tools of production in great masses, perfecting industrial processes."
"In the madness of self-aggrandisement only preparing, organising, enriching, making ready the lawful inheritance of the suffering proletariat."
"Murder is always with us. It is almost an institution."
"The attack must have all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy."
"There are natures too, to whose sense of justice the price exacted looms up monstrously enormous, odious, oppressive, worrying, humiliating, extortionate, intolerable."
"Most of the revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue mostly."
"The future is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice."
"There is no law and no certainty. The teaching propaganda be hanged."
"Unless I am very much mistaken, you are the man who would know the inside of this confounded affair."
"In principle what one of us may or may not know as to any given fact can't be a matter for inquiry to the others."
"My absolute rule is never to refuse anybody—as long as I have a pinch by me."
"To break up the superstition and worship of legality should be our aim."
"You revolutionists will never understand that. You plan the future, you lose yourselves in reveries of economical systems derived from what is."
"Eighteen stone, I should say, and not five foot six. Poor fellow! It's terrible—terrible."
"There is no doubt about you knowing your business—no doubt at all."
"This by itself is enough for us to go upon, sir, with that sort of man." - Chief Inspector
"He associates with men who are classed as dangerous." - Chief Inspector
"It was the liberation of his inner life, the letting out of his soul into the wide world." - Narration about Michaelis
"I must do my work in my own way." - Chief Inspector
"To be taken into a bed of compassion was the supreme remedy." - Narration about Stevie
"But the unreasonableness of such a suspicion was patent, and Mr. Verloc held his tongue." - Narration about Mr. Verloc
"The anguish of immoderate compassion was succeeded by the pain of an innocent but pitiless rage." - Narration about Stevie
"You aren’t ever hungry." - Winnie to Stevie
"Police aren’t for that." - Winnie to Stevie
"A simple sentence may hold several diverse meanings—mostly disagreeable."
"Practical and subtle in her way, she brought Stevie to the front without loss of time, because in her the singleness of purpose had the unerring nature and the force of an instinct."
"Mr. Verloc went on divesting himself of his clothing with the unnoticing inward concentration of a man undressing in the solitude of a vast and hopeless desert."
"Mrs. Verloc kept very still, perfectly still, with her eyes fixed in a dreamy, quiet stare."
"Mr. Verloc loved his wife as a wife should be loved—that is, maritally, with the regard one has for one’s chief possession."
"She was mysterious, with the mysteriousness of living beings."
"Mr. Verloc’s soul, if lacking greatness perhaps, was capable of tender sentiments."
"The mind of Mr. Verloc lacked profundity. Under the mistaken impression that the value of individuals consists in what they are in themselves, he could not possibly comprehend the value of Stevie in the eyes of Mrs. Verloc."
"Mr. Verloc had never expected to have to face [his wife's grief] on account of death, whose catastrophic character cannot be argued away by sophisticated reasoning or persuasive eloquence."
What pleased me most in this affair," the Assistant went on, talking slowly, "is that it makes such an excellent starting-point for a piece of work which I’ve felt must be taken in hand—that is, the clearing out of this country of all the foreign political spies, police, and that sort of—of—dogs.
"Every emotion of a woman is bound to end in a shower."
"It is universally understood that, as if it were nothing more substantial than vapour floating in the sky."
"The lamentable circumstances of Stevie’s end dried her tears at their very source."
"A life of single purpose and of a noble unity of inspiration."
"The protection she had extended over her brother had been in its origin of a fierce and indignant complexion."
"The heart, hardened and chilled into a lump of ice, kept her body in an inward shudder."
"Mr. Verloc was temperamentally no respecter of persons."
"A secret agent who throws his secrecy to the winds from desire of vengeance becomes the mark for desperate and bloodthirsty indignations."
"The sensation of unappeasable hunger, not unknown after the strain of a hazardous enterprise to adventurers of tougher fibre."
"The vast world created for the glory of man was only a vast blank to Mrs. Verloc."
"A love like mine could not be concealed from a woman like you."
"In the hansom, the robust anarchist became explanatory."
"The train roll[ed] quicker, rumbling heavily to the sound of the woman’s loud sobs."