Life & Wisdom Quote by John Le Carre

Le Carre doesn’t scold you into reverence; he warns you about consequences. “Given to any of us” is the key tell: it frames speech not as a heroic individual right but as a human limitation. In his world, nobody gets to float above systems of belief that bind millions, organize power, and store up grievance. “Impertinent” is a deliberately old-fashioned word, less about principled critique than about cleverness with a sneer. He’s not defending theology so much as cautioning against the cheap thrill of provocation.

The subtext is classic le Carre: moral seriousness paired with deep suspicion of the amateur. Great religions are portrayed as geopolitical forces, not delicate feelings. To be “impertinent” toward them is to misunderstand what you’re poking: communities with long memories, institutions with allies, and narratives that can metabolize insult into recruitment fuel. “With impunity” sharpens the point. It implies there’s always a bill, and it won’t necessarily be paid by the person who made the remark. The cost can be social fracture, violence, or the hardening of identities into camps.

Contextually, this reads like a post-Rushdie, post-cartoon-controversies sensibility: a liberal commitment to free expression that’s been forced to reckon with how speech circulates in a media ecosystem built for outrage. Le Carre’s intent isn’t to sanctify religion; it’s to insist that irreverence is not the same thing as courage, and that treating “great religions” as punchlines is a form of strategic illiteracy.