Clearly you are, since you want to revolutionize it. “Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it by threats, persuasion, or bribes.”. The Professor, in conversation with Ossipon, opposes his particular brand of anarchism with that of the latter's Red Committee. An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness and despair. I'm not literally calling her Jane Bond, I mean, but a female secret agent. It governs your action, too, and thus neither your thought nor your action can ever be conclusive. Chief Inspector Heat...gave a thought of regret to the world of thieves--sane, without morbid ideals, working by routine, respectful of constituted authority, free from all taint of hate and despair. 'The Secret Agent,' Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel about an anarchist plot to blow up the Royal Observatory at Greenwich - in fact, a scheme by a secret police agent to stir up a government backlash - has acquired a kind of cult status as the classic novel for the post-9/11 age. In this conversation between Chief Inspector Heat and his superior, the Assistant Commissioner, Conrad keeps us informed of all the things that Inspector Heat wants to say but cannot because of his inferior rank. Conrad depicts the anarchists as pathetic figures whose actual conditions of existence belie their firebrand rhetoric. Every so often, however, he infiltrates some big-budget movie he clearly doesn't belong in - 'Anaconda,' 'Armageddon,' 'The Haunting' - and struggles valiantly to stop it from sucking. They were his fellow citizens gone wrong because of imperfect education, Chief Inspector Heat believed; but allowing for that difference, he could understand the mind of a burglar, because, as a matter of fact, the mind and the instincts of a burglar are of the same kind as the mind and the instincts of a police officer. “To break up the superstition and worship of legality should be our aim. For example, Ossipon, Karl Yundt, and Michaelis all depend upon women for material and emotional support. Here you talk, print, plot, and do nothing.”. “We can never cease to be ourselves.”. He plays his little game -- so do you propagandists.”, “No man engaged in a work he does not like can preserve many saving illusions, “The cabman looked at the pieces of silver, which, appearing very minute in his big, grimy palm, symbolised the insignificant results which reward the ambitious courage and toil of a mankind whose day is short on this earth of evil.”, “It is this country that is dangerous, with her idealistic conception of legality. "Well then--speaking privately if you like--how long have you been in private touch with this Embassy spy? All Quotes Half our battle would be won then; the disintegration of the old morality would have set in its very temple. It was labour, whose practical difference from the other forms of labour consisted in the nature of its risk, which did not lie in ankylosis, or lead poisoning, or fire-damp, or gritty dust, but in what may be briefly defined in its own special phraseology as "Seven years' hard". Of all those in the army close to the commander none is more intimate than the secret agent; of all rewards none more liberal than those given to secret agents; of all matters none is more confidential than those relating to … So I related that through movies and stuff. Like to like. Refresh and try again. Your notion of a humanity universally putting out the tongue and taking the pill from pole to pole at the bidding of a few solemn jokers is worthy of the prophet....”. From age 14 to right before I graduated college, I was really interested in the foreign service and the United Nations. But 'Under Western Eyes' dares to leap inside - not only into the terrorist mind, but also into the troubled zone that divides West from East, 'the autocracy in mystic vestments.'. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.”, “[Perverse] unreason has its own logical processes”, “There too he had been treated with revolting injustice. In this case, he feels outraged by the plight of the cabman's poor horse and the cabman's family. The police, in particular, are exposed as the pawns of the ruling, propertied class. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

I've always thought that there is a great female James Bond movie to be done. (...) 'You are not a bit better than the forces arrayed against you -- than the police, for instance. Besides reporting his verbal outbursts and mutterings, Conrad also accords the young man a great deal of physical description in order to illustrate how he speaks profoundly with his gestures and expressions.

If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent. Lin, Alexander. But his thieves were not rebels. In their own way the most ardent of revolutionaries are perhaps doing no more but seeking for peace in common with the rest of mankind--the peace of soothed vanity, of satisfied appetites, or perhaps of appeased conscience. That sort of future will take care of itself if you will only make room for it. ", "Long before you were ever thought of for your place here.". His bodily vigour, his cool, inflexible manner, his courage, and his fairness, had secured for him much respect and some adulation in the sphere of his early successes. Oh, I can keep many secrets, so I would be a phenomenal secret agent. Those are the fanatics. “After a while he became disagreeably affected by the sight of the roadway thronged with vehicles and of the pavement crowded with men and women. They are nourishing their greed on the quivering flesh and the warm blood of the people - nothing else.”, “A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both ends of the social scale.”, “(law is) the pretty branding instrument invented by the overfed to protect themselves against the hungry ?”, “You revolutionists' the other continued, with leisurely self-confidence, 'are the slaves of the social convention, which is afraid of you; slaves of it as much as the very police that stands up in the defence of that convention. BrainyQuote has been providing inspirational quotes since 2001 to our worldwide community.
The mind of Chief Inspector Heat was inaccessible to ideas of revolt. Stevie, though never able to articulate more than monosyllables, turns out to be one of the most moving characters of the novel. We’d love your help. I'd be a terrible secret agent. But I was thinking of my perfect detonator only. “I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have to do something for it.”. Don't you know what the police are for, Stevie? ”, “As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.”, “There are more kinds of fools than one can guard against.”, “Do you know how I would call the nature of the present economic conditions? Products of the same machine, one classed as useful and the other as noxious, they take the machine for granted in different ways, but with a seriousness essentially the same. I can't keep a secret and I'm not sneaky. I love secrets. He was as insignificant as -- I can't call to mind anything insignificant enough to compare him with -- except Karl Yundt perhaps.

He was in a long, straight street, peopled by a mere fraction of an immense multitude; but all round him, on and on, even to the limits of the horizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks, he felt the mass of mankind mighty in its numbers. He had felt himself revered and admired. In 'The Secret Agent,' it's basically a character that was admired by Theodore Kaczynski, which is some fan mail you don't really want to open. I wanted to be a pilot. Suduiko, Aaron ed. Why should I give him more than a glance ? The Professor's indignation found in itself a final cause that absolued him from the sin of turning to destruction as the agent of his ambition. He realizes, too, that this kind of personal preparation is only effective insofar as others know about it and fear him for it; external impressions give him his individual power. The majority of revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue mostly. "The Secret Agent Quotes and Analysis". And the lofty pretensions of a mankind oppressed by the miserable indignities of the weather appeared as a colossal and hopeless vanity deserving of scorn, wonder, and compassion.”, “For history is made with tools, not with ideas; and everything is changed by economic conditions - art, philosophy, love, virtue - truth itself!”, “Ossip, I think you are a humbug...you are not even a doctor. Nobody looked at him. That she, in fact, comes over -- with a knife, and stabs him -- makes apparent the way in which the simple language of marriage and affection can conceal the power relations and material dependencies that would eventually drive Mrs. Verloc to murder. The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. He drew them with a certain complacency, because the instinct of conventional respectability was strong within him, being only overcome by defect which he shared with a large proportion of revolutionary reformers of a given social state.