Quotes from Robert Harris

If you are afraid of wolves, keep out of the woods. - J. V. Stalin, 1936

Tak usah cemas, akan banyak waktu untuk tidur setelah kita mati.

I am not a pacifist. The main lesson I have learned in my dealings with Hitler is that one simply can't play poker with a gangster if one has no cards in one's hand.

All civilisations consider themselves invulnerable; history warns us that none is.

Sometimes, he said, summing up the discussion with an aphorism I have never forgotten, if you find yourself stuck in politics, the thing to do is start a fight--start a fight, even if you do not know how you are going to win it, because it is only when a fight is on, and everything is in motion, that you can hope to see your way through.

Sometimes it is foolish to articulate an ambition too early--exposing it prematurely to the laughter and skepticism of the world can destroy it before it is even properly born. But sometimes the opposite occurs, and the very act of mentioning a thing makes it suddenly seem possible, even plausible.

In the end, the only safe place to put a Trojan horse is outside your walls.

Brave words. Easy to write when one was young and death was still skulking over a distant hill somewhere... - Pg. 82

You were too young to fight in the last war, and I was too old. In some ways that made it worse.

There is a wonderful line in one of Cicero's letters to Atticus in which he describes moving into a property and says: I have put out my books and now my house has a soul.

This sort of talk always bores me: old men complaining that the world is going to the dogs. It's so banal.

Acceptance. That, he had learned in Russia many years ago, was the secret of survival. ... Accept it. Wait. Let the system exhaust itself. Protest will only raise your blood pressure.

The fact is, as the proverb says, before you can cook your rabbit you first have to catch it.

What a heap of ash most political careers amount to, when one really stops to consider them!

Gratitude, he said, quoting Stalin, is a dog's disease.

I found, for example, that Cicero was fond of repeating certain phrases, and these I learned to reduce to a line, or even a few dots--thus proving what most people already know, that politicians essentially say the same thing over and over again.

March had a routine for reading the paper. He started at the back, with the truth. If Leipzig was said to have beaten Cologne four-nil at football, the chances were it was true: even the Party had yet to devise a means of rewriting the sports results. The sports news was a different matter. COUNTDOWN

This is the nightmare I have always dreaded. It's as if we've learned nothing from the last war and we are reliving August 1914. One by one the countries of the world will be dragged in - and for what?

The avenue was designed by Reichsminister Albert Speer and completed in 1957. It is one hundred and twenty-three meters wide and five-point-six kilometers in length. It is both wider, and two and a half times longer, than the Chaps Elysees in Paris. Higher, longer, bigger, wider, more expensive...even in victory, thought March, Germany has a parvenu's inferiority complex. Nothing stands on its own. Everything has to be compared with what the foreigners have....

So," said Ruth, "how bad is it?" "You haven't read it?" "Not all of it." "Well," I said, politely, "it needs some work." "How much?" The words "Hiroshima" and "nineteen forty-five" floated briefly into my mind. "It's fixable," I said, which I suppose it was: even Hiroshima was fixed eventually.

But popularity and power, as he well knew, are separate entities. Often the most powerful men in a state can pass down a street unrecognised, while the most famous bask in feted impotence.

In the absence of genius there is always craftsmanship.

Really, take it from me: it is always the unknown that is most frightening.

Ich stellte mir seine Gedanken als einen schnellen, schmalen Wasserstrom vor, der sich durch die Fugen eines gefliesten Bodens bewegte - erst vorwärts, dann nach links und rechts ausgreifend, an einem Punkt kurz innehaltend, in eine andere Richtung weiter vorstoßend, sich immer weiter ausbreitend und verzweigend und dabei in seiner schimmernden, flüssigen Bewegung all die kleinen Möglichkeiten, Kosequenzen und Wahrscheinlichkeiten bedenkend.