Quotes from Robert Harris

On the Richter scale of bad ideas, this had to be a ten.

Let us drink to pointless heroism.

The Spartan statesman Lycurgus, seven hundred years ago, is said to have observed: When falls on man the anger of the gods, First from his mind they banish understanding. Such was to be the fate of Caesar. I am sure Cicero was correct: he had gone mad. His success had made him vain, and his vanity had devoured his reason.

like interviewing a new cleaner. Do you want someone who can give you the history of cleaning and the theory of cleaning, or do you want someone who'll just get down and clean your fucking house? They chose you because they think you'll clean their fucking house.

more enemies, more honour.

but we must be careful not to do our enemies' work for them. To argue that to preserve our freedoms we must suspend our freedoms, that to safeguard elections we must cancel elections, that to defend ourselves from dictatorship we must appoint a dictator—what logic is this? We

What fascinates people isn't policy- who cares about policy? What fascinates people is always people- the detail of another person's life.

Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name?

Time. Now here is a peculiar commodity, boy. The measurement of time. Best accomplished, obviously, with a watch. But, lacking a watch, a man may use instead the ebb and flow of light and dark. Lacking, however, a window through which to see such movement, the reliance must be devolved upon some inner mechanism of the mind. But if the mind has received a shock, the mechanism is disturbed, and time becomes as the ground is to a drunkard, variable.

A dog looks up to you, a cat looks down on you, but a pig looks you straight in the eye.

A permanent state of war on the Eastern front will help to form a sound race of men,' the Führer had once said, 'and will prevent us relapsing into the softness of a Europe thrown back upon itself.' But

Then came a volley of colorful abuse, delivered in such an imperious voice, at at such a volume, that Terentia's distant ancestor, who had commanded the Roman line against Hannibal at Cannae a century and a half before, must surely have sat bolt upright in his tomb.

As if earthquakes aren't as much a part of living in Campania as hot springs and summer droughts!

Officially it was almost spring but someone had forgotten to pass the news on to winter.

A crock of shit," Rick had called it. But actually this was worse. Shit, to quote Gore Vidal, has its own integrity. This was a crock of nothing.

Outwardly, I hope, I wear my usual mask of detachment, even irony, for there has never been a situation,however dire, even this one, that did not strike me as containing at least some element of the human comedy.

A ghost who has only a lay knowledge of the subject will be able to keep asking the same questions as the lay reader, and will therefore open up the potential readership of the book to a much wider audience.

I feel as if I have walked into a mirrored room and glimpsed myself from an unfamiliar angle for the first time. Is that really what I look like? Is that who I am?

ma a Roma un uomo onesto era un uomo raro: cioè un cretino.

Con quale velocità, pensò l'ingegnere, la natura si riprende ciò che ha dovuto cedere: pioggia e gelo sbriciolano la muratura, le strade sono sepolte da strati verdi di erbaccia, gli acquedotti sono ostruiti dalla stessa acqua per portare la quale sono stati costruiti. Quella della civiltà è un'incessante guerra che l'uomo è destinato a perdere.

You can always spot a fool, for he is the man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election. But an election is a living thing -- you might almost say, the most vigorously alive thing there is -- with thousands upon thousands of brains and limbs and eyes and thoughts and desires, and it will wriggle and turn and run off in directions no one ever predicted, sometimes just for the joy of proving the wiseacres wrong.

History has always fascinated me. As Cicero himself once wrote: '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?' I quickly forgot the cold and could have spent all day happily unwinding that roll, poring over the events of more than sixty years before.

I have put out my books and now my house has a soul.

Since when has idiocy been a bar to advancement in politics?