Quotes from Robert Harris

Mother Nature is punishing us, ..., for our greed and selfishness. We torture her at all hours by iron and wood, fire and stone. We dig her up and dump her in the sea. We sink mine shafts into her and drag out her entrails - and all for a jewel to wear on a pretty finer. Who can blame her if she occasionally quivers with anger? - Pliny, Pg. 176

any rash fool can be a hero if he sets no value on his life, or hasn't the wit to appreciate danger. But to understand the risk, perhaps even to flinch at first, but then to summon the strength to face them down - that in my opinion is the most commendable form of valour

Travel is sold as freedom, but we were about as free as lab rats. This is how they'll manage the next Holocaust, I thought, as I shuffled forward in my stockinged feet: they'll simply issue us with air tickets and we'll do whatever we're told

Power depended on being in the room when the decisions were taken.

For them, it was just an ordinary miracle.

An excess of simplicity, after all, was just another form of ostentation, and pride in one's humility a sin.

There is no such thing as a secret—not really, not in the modern world, not with photography and telegraphy and railways and newspaper presses.

Nothing is more important to a nation than its history. It is the earth upon which any society stands.

Bachelors of forty are society's stray cats. We are taken in by households and fed and made a fuss of;

There are occasions when losing is a victory, so long as there is a fight.

A nothing that said everything.

Truth was like any other material necessary for the making of war: it had to be beaten and bent and cut into the required shape.

What starts as gratitude quickly becomes dependency and ends as entitlement

You cant build on a mass grave. Human beings are better than that - we have to be better than that - I do believe, don't you? Charlie McGuire, Fatherland

Anyone found not enjoying themselves will be shot.

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

I read a lot of bad books- books so bad that they aren't even published,which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published. - The Ghost, Robert Harris.

And the great thing about money is that it doesn't matter when you harvest it. It's an all-year crop.

And so we drifted towards calamity. At times, Cicero was shrewd enough to see it. "Can a constitution devised centuries ago to replace a monarchy, and based upon a citizens' militia, possibly hope to run an empire whose scope is beyond anything ever dreamed of by its framers? Or must the existence of standing armies and the influx of inconceivable wealth inevitably destroy our democratic system?

the wise man never assumes anything, never regrets anything, is never wrong, never changes his mind.

Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.

In fact fear is probably the strongest human emotion, period. Whoever woke at four in the morning because they were feeling happy?

Quod volimus credimus libenter we always believe what we want to believe

Thus the thermal energy released during the A.D. 79 eruption would have been roughly 2 x 1018 joules—or about 100,000 times that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.