The Secret Agent Rules and Order Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Chapter. Paragraph)

Quote #1

[Mr. Verloc] surveyed through the park railings the evidences of the towns opulence and luxury with an approving eye. All these people had to be protected. Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury. They had to be protected; and their horses, carriages, houses, servants had to be protected. (2.1)

There's nothing Verloc values more than his ability to live a lazy and privileged life. In this passage, Conrad comes closest to giving Mr. Verloc an ethos or moral code of some kind. Verloc believes that he's part of something beyond himself: a social effort to protect the privileged people from all the filthy beggars. The tone of the book really doesn't seem to be on Verloc's side, though. The narrator has just called him a fat pig, and has suggested that his laziness is something the maybe he shouldn't be allowed to get away with. Just maybe.

Quote #2

"Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it either by threats, persuasion, or bribes […] The demonstration must be against learning—science. But not every science will do. The attack must have all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy." (2.111)

In describing his plans to Verloc, Mr. Vladimir explains that in order to freak out English society, someone has to do something that totally makes no sense. When people can explain something in everyday terms, that thing doesn't have a big impact. When something awful happens that makes no sense at all, though, people start standing up and shouting for something to be done. The logic is similar to the Professor's. Like Vladimir, the Professor knows that if you want to really shake things up, you've got to do something that totally shatters peoples idea of how things are supposed to go. This is why the Professor has such a deep impact on Inspector Heat.

Quote #3

"They have more character over there [in the United States], and their character is essentially anarchistic. Fertile ground for us, the States—very good ground. The great Republic has the roots of the destructive matter in her. The collective temperament is lawless. Excellent." (4.86)

Here, the Professor tells Ossipon that the United States is a better place than England because the United States (according to him) is basically a lawless place. The Professor admits that if he tried his bomb-tricks in the U.S., he'd probably get shot in the head. The reason this doesn't happen in England is because English society still believes in the ideals of law and order. The Professor, and possibly the book as well, believes that the America of 1886 was still pretty much the Wild West. The Professor speaks of this with approval, since in a place like America, the weak people get weeded out by the strong.