Wit & Attitude Quote by John Le Carre

Le Carre’s jab lands because it’s aimed at a very specific kind of self-seriousness: the expert who mistakes technical mastery for having something worth saying. He’s not really attacking multilingualism; he’s puncturing the prestige economy around it. In espionage fiction and in real diplomacy, language is a fetishized credential, a passport into rooms where importance is performed. Le Carre twists the knife by suggesting that the performance is often hollow: people collect languages the way others collect titles, then use them to deliver the same emptiness with added flourish.

The construction is pure barbed cadence. “Fools” opens like a verdict, not an argument. “Most linguists” is the sly qualifier that makes it feel observational rather than purely cranky, as if he’s seen enough conferences, briefings, and academic peacocking to form a pattern. Then the repetition of “damn all” does the real work: it’s a blunt instrument, collapsing content and intention into nothingness. Learning “another” language doesn’t elevate the message; it only expands the radius of the void.

Context matters. Le Carre came out of the intelligence world, where language skill is both tool and disguise, and where words are routinely deployed to obscure motives rather than clarify truth. The subtext isn’t “languages are useless,” but “fluency can become a cover story.” It’s a warning about cultural capital: communication isn’t virtue, and sophistication isn’t substance.