Quotes from Robert Harris

It's your Church I don't believe in, sir. Your God I treat

Cicero's first law of rhetoric, that a speech must always contain at least one surprise.

You know, boy, people criticise Stalin, but you've got to say this for him: he lived like a worker. Not like Beria – he thought he was a prince. But Comrade Stalin's room was a plain man's room. You've got to say that for Stalin. He was always one of us.

The vulgar always assumed it was best to try to know everything; in his experience it was often better to know as little as possible.

Every evil is easily crushed at birth; allow it to become established and it always gathers strength.

There a few forces in politics harder to resist than a feeling that something is inevitable, for humans move as a flock, and will always rush like sheep toward the safety of a winner.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history? —Cicero, Orator, 46 BC

It is simply impossible to expect the peoples of Britain and France to take up arms to deny the right of self-determination to ethnic Germans who are trapped in a foreign country they wish to leave.

sixth birthday?" asked Cicero. "He told me over dinner the other night: 'More people worship a rising than a setting sun.

Few subjects make more tedious reading than happiness.

Rome is not merely a matter of geography...Rome is not defined by rivers, or mountains, or even seas; Rome is not a question of blood or race, or religion; Rome is an ideal. Rome is the highest embodiment of liberty and law that mankind has yet achieved since our ancestors came down from those mountains and learned to live as communities under the rule of law

The elderly live on air, and I am very old—almost a hundred, or so they tell me.

Needless to say, it passed, for what group of voters ever refused to levy a tax on someone else, especially if it benefited themselves?

He remembered a line of graffiti scrawled by White Rose on a wall near Werderscher Markt: 'A police state is a country run by criminals'.

Within reason, I can write what I like and spend as long doing it as is necessary. That is a luxury beyond price.

To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it's ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.

To be brave, by definition, one has first to be afraid.

Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk's too big, the desk's too small, there's too much noise, there's too much quiet, it's too hot, too cold, too early, too late. I had learned over the years to ignore them all, and simply to start.

Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.

Cicero smiled at us. 'The art of life is to deal with problems as they arise, rather than destory one's spirit by worrying about them too far in advance. Especially tonight.

What is leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason

A police state is a country run by criminals

But only a fool sails into combat with nature

People perish. Books are immortal.