Eric Ambler Quotes

#1. International business may conduct its operations with scraps of paper, but the ink it uses is human blood.

Eric Ambler

#2. For instance, Visser, the Dutchman, had sold German machine guns to the Chinese, spied for the Japanese and served a term of imprisonment for killing a coolie in Batavia. He was not an easy man to handle.

Eric Ambler

#3. If such things were not so dangerous one would laugh. But one recognizes the technique. Such propaganda always begins with words, but soon it proceeds to deeds. When there are no facts to support lies, facts must be made.

Eric Ambler

#4. We can learn only in the expectation of life. Europe is too preoccupied with its destruction to concern itself with such things. A condemned man is interested only in himself, the passage of hours and such intimations of immortality as he can conjure from the recesses of his mind.

Eric Ambler

#5. They don't talk the same language as us. I don't mean that they don't speak English, but that their minds are different. They're like animals, and because I hate the sight and sound of them, and because you're a Britisher, I'm telling you to get out now while the going's good.

Eric Ambler

#6. Good' did not triumph. 'Evil' did not triumph. The two resolved, destroyed each other and created new 'evils', new 'goods' which slew each other in their turn.

Eric Ambler

#7. Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through it

Eric Ambler

#8. We are trespassing on your hospitality

Eric Ambler

#9. In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner.

Eric Ambler

#10. I tell you this, my friend; all men are cowards. They dislike a fact except when it is so wrapped up in lies and sentiments that the sharp edge of it cannot hurt them. When a man tells the truth he his, depend upon it, a dangerous man.

Eric Ambler

#11. But when you have been nourishing your soul on expectation, reality is apt to be disappointing.

Eric Ambler

#12. A person who searched rooms, brandished pistols, dangled promises of half a million franc fees for nameless services and then wrote instructions to Polish spies might reasonably be regarded with suspicion. But suspicion of what?

Eric Ambler

#13. Ballet is merely a new rationalization of society's instinctive movement towards self-destruction. A dance of death for the Gadarene swine.

Eric Ambler

#14. The important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.

Eric Ambler

#15. Reality is always so obstructive.

Eric Ambler