Quotes from Robert Harris

How fortunate the man who never knew doubt.

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. "Before

He sought refuge in his books

The trouble with Lucious, he said, putting his feet up on the desk after this cousin has gone, is that he thinks politics is a fight for justice. Politics is a profession.

shall never forget as long as I live the sensation of unrolling each of the eight books of Aristotle's Politics: tiny cylinders of minute Greek characters, the edges slightly damaged by damp from the caves in Asia Minor where they had been hidden for many years. It was like reaching back through time and touching the face of a god.

siempre se puede decir una cosa de la política: jamás permanece estática. Si los buenos tiempos no duran eternamente, los malos tampoco.

ciertamente reacio, pero se negó a marcharse hasta haber recibido contestación.

It is in the nature of things that not all politicians can achieve greatness.

Where was the respect? The boys all looked like girls and the girls all looked like whores. Clearly, the country was already halfway in the shit.

But really, why would one bother to imitate anything so vulnerable and unreliable, or with such built-in obsolescence: a central processing unit that could be utterly destroyed because some ancillary mechanical part – the heart, say, or the liver – suffered a temporary interruption? It was like losing a Cray supercomputer and all of its memory files because a plug needed changing.

To choose one's victims, to prepare one's plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed ... there is nothing sweeter in the world. - J. V. Stalin

The trouble with Lucius," he said, putting his feet up on the desk after his cousin had gone, "is that he thinks politics is a fight for justice. Politics is a profession.

But there is as much skill in knowing how to handle a meeting of ten as there is in manipulating a gathering of hundreds.

Fear is historically the strongest emotion in economics. Remember FDR in the Great Depression? It's the most famous quote in financial history: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." In fact fear is probably the strongest human emotion, period. Whoever woke at four in the morning because they were feeling happy?

He glanced around the reading room and closed his eyes, trying to keep hold of the past for a minute longer, a fattening and hungover middle-aged historian in a black corduroy suit.

Kelso's hangover had gone, to be replaced by that familiar phase of post-alcoholic euphoria - always in the past, his most productive time of day - a feeling that alone was enough to make getting drunk worthwhile.

No one who follows their conscience ever does wrong. - Cardinal Vincent Benitez

Push out a bayonet. If it strikes fat, push deeper. If it strikes iron, pull back for another day.

From the subjective perspective, he may seem cruel, even wicked. But the glory of the man is to be found in the objective perspective.

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?

Curio had made his fortune in the East as a soldier under Sulla, but was rather slow-witted, with a poor memory. As an orator he was known as 'The Fly-Swatter' because of his habit of throwing his arms around when he spoke.

We pressed on up the Flaminian Way, devoting a day to each of the decent-sized towns – Narnia, Carsulae, Mevania, Fulginiae, Nuceria, Tadinae and Cales – before finally reaching the Adriatic coast about two weeks after leaving Rome.

I told you this would happen. I am Cassandra—doomed to see the future yet destined never to be believed.

A sex scandal will always draw a crowd, but a sex scandal involving the ruling classes is titillating beyond measure.