From John Le Carre's Smiley's People:
Returning to bed, he opened a copy of Cobbett’s Rural Rides and tried to read it while he loosely pondered, among other weighty matters, his sense of civitas and how much, or how little, he owed to Oliver Lacon: “Your duty, George.” Yet who could seriously be Lacon’s man? he asked himself. Who could regard Lacon’s fragile arguments as Caesar’s due?
“Émigrés in, émigrés out. Two legs good, two legs bad,” he muttered aloud.
All his professional life, it seemed to Smiley, he had listened to similar verbal antics signalling supposedly great changes in Whitehall doctrine; signalling restraint, self-denial, always another reason for doing nothing.
Does "Two legs good, two legs bad" allude to George Orwell's "Animal Farm," where the slogan "Four legs good, two legs bad" is used by the animals?
