Quotes from Alistair MacLean

One had but to look at him to appreciate that he had been doomed from the cradle to end up in the Oval Office: that anyone else should aspire to be – or be – the Chief Executive was quite unthinkable.

This won't look so good in my obituary," Schaffer said dolefully. There was a perceptible edge of strain under the lightly-spoken words."Gave his life for his country in a ladies' lavatory in Upper Bavaria.

There are no brave men and cowardly men in the world, my son. There are only brave men. To be born, to live, to die—that takes courage enough in itself, and more than enough. We are all brave men and we are all afraid, and what the world calls a brave man, he too is brave and afraid like the all rest of us. Only he is brave for five minutes longer.

She had the best kind of courage, or maybe the worst kind, the kind that gets you into trouble.

The point I make is simply that cruelty and hate and intolerance are the monopoly of no particular race or creed or time. They have been with us since the world began and are still with us, in every country in the world.

the men of the Ulysses had no need to stand in shame...many had found, or were finding, that the point of no return was not necessarily the edge of the precipice: it could be the bottom of the valley, the beginning of the long climb up the far slope, and when a man had once begun that climb he never looked back to that other side.

Bowman turned his back on her and began to search the place methodically and exhaustively. When one searches any place, be it a gypsy caravan or a baronial mansion, methodically and exhaustively, one has to wreck it completely in the process.So, in a orderly and systematic fashion, Bowman set about reducing Czerda's caravan to a total ruin.

Foster always said that education was very important, but that it didn't really matter, because intelligence was more important than that, and that even intelligence didn't count for so much, that wisdom was far more important still. He said he had no idea in the world whether you had education or intelligence or wisdom and that it couldn't matter less, a blind man could see that you had a good heart, and the good heart was all that mattered in this world.

I am not a novelist, I'm a storyteller. There is no art in what I do. No mystique.

Women, I thought: if they fell over a cliff and thought there was company waiting at the bottom, they'd comb their hair on the way down.

Every man is what environment and heredity make him.

A terrified rat will swear to anything.

The first thing I noticed was the gun in his hands, and it wasn't the sort of gun a beginner carries around with him. A big dull black German Mauser 7.63. One of those economical guns; the bullet goes clear through three people at once.

The Major Smiths of this world don't drive over the edge of a cliff. Quotation from the future Mrs. Schaffer. The Major Smiths of this world don't fall off the roofs of cable cars. Quotation from the future Mrs. Schaffer's future husband.

To all things an end. To every night a dawn. Even to longest night when dawn never comes, there comes, at last, the dawn.

Why didn't you shoot him?" "I'm a changed man, boss." Schaffer sighed. "Something splendid has just come into my life." "Besides, you didn't have a chance." "Besides, as you say, I didn't have a chance.

I should have listened to Hunslett. Again I should have listened to Hunslett. And again for Hunslett's sake. But I didn't know then that Hunslett was to have time for all the sleep in the world.

We, ironically known as the civilizados - in practically everything that matters they're a damned sight more civilized than we are - bring them so-called progress, which harms them, so-called change, which harms them, so-called civilization, which harms them even more, and desease, which kills them.

Nature wanted to show mankind, an irreverent, over-venturesome mankind, just how puny and pitifully helpless a thing mankind really is…

The intolerance of ignorance, not wanting to know – that is the last real frontier on earth.

what would be left of it by that time—would be in the Kola

With a face and a figure and an acting talent like that, she could have had Hollywood tramping a path of beaten gold to her doorstep.

Smith] blew a warning blast of his town horn, twisted the wheel and slewed the bus into the side of the street. His intentions were unmistakable and the motorcycle patrol's decision to elect for discretion in lieu of suicidal valour was as immediate as it was automatic. They frantically abandoned their machines and flung themselves for their lives up the steps of Zum Wilden Hirsch.

He shivered uncontrollably and turned his back on the driving wind. 'Anyway, I wish to God I had his job,' he added feelingly. 'This is worse than winter in Alberta!