Quotes from Robert Harris

People will perish, but books are immortal. (Pompeii)

it has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the mediocre...

A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it's halfway to being just like every other bloody book that's ever been written.

By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.

But clever people all make one mistake. They all think everyone else is stupid. And everyone isn't stupid. They just take a bit more time, that's all.

You can always spot a fool, for he is a man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election.

It is perseverance, and not genius that takes a man to the top. Rome is full of unrecognized geniuses. Only perseverance enables you to move forward in the world.

Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually.

The destination of the journey could not be altered, only the manner in which one approached it - whether one chose to walk erect or to be dragged complaining through the dust.

Another of Cicero's maxims was that if you must do something unpopular, you might as well do it wholeheartedly, for in politics there is no credit to be won by timidity.

All good books are different but all bad books are exactly the same. I know this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot of bad books - books so bad they aren't even published, which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published. And what they all have in common, these bad books, be they novels or memoirs, is this: they don't ring true. I'm not saying that a good book is true necessarily, just that it feels true for the time you're reading it.

Politics? Boring? Politics is history on the wing! What other sphere of human activity calls forth all that is most noble in men's souls, and all that is most base? Or has such excitement? Or more vividly exposes our strengths and weaknesses? Boring? You might as well say that life itself is boring!

What do you do,' he said, 'if you devote your life to discovering criminals, and it gradually occurs to you that the real criminals are the people you work for? What do you do when everyone tells you not to worry, you can't do anything about it, it was a long time ago?' She was looking at him in a different way. 'I suppose you go crazy.' 'Or worse. Sane.

Any man who is truly worthy must consider himself unworthy.

The natural impulse of men is to follow, he thought, and whoever has the strongest sense of purpose will always dominate the rest.

And people would believe it, thought Hartmann, because people believed what they wanted to believe – that was Goebbels's great insight. They no longer had any need to bother themselves with inconvenient truths. He had given them an excuse not to think.

No one who ever follows their conscience ever does wrong. The consequences may not turn out as we intended; it may prove that we made a mistake. But that is not the same as being wrong.

This was the problem with drinks parties: getting stuck with a person you didn't want to talk to while someone you did was tantalisingly in view.

The financial world is at the cutting edge of high technology.

Leaders today are isolated by phalanxes of body guards. It's profoundly undemocratic, the way they have used terrorism as a means to protect themselves.

Unlike the Holocaust, Stalin's murders are forgotten: dust blowing in the wind.

Everyone thinks politics will just go on the way it is. I don't agree.

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.

One cannot see any world leader who has got a grip on the financial markets these days. They're too big, too fast. I think that's quite scary.