Top 100 Robert Harris Quotes
#1. Another of Cicero's maxims was that if you must do something unpopular, you might as well do it wholeheartedly, for in politics there is no credit to be won by timidity.
Robert Harris
#2. I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety.
Robert Harris
#3. I lay aside the papers. Really, it is beyond hypocrisy; it is beyond even lying: it has become a psychosis.
Robert Harris
#4. You can't make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.
Robert Harris
#6. But clever people all make one mistake. They all think everyone else is stupid. And everyone isn't stupid. They just take a bit more time, that's all.
Robert Harris
#7. I've always just wanted to earn my living by writing. The best thing is to go into my study in the morning and put words together.
Robert Harris
#8. No one who follows their conscience ever does wrong. - Cardinal Vincent Benitez
Robert Harris
#10. History is too important to be left to the historians.
Robert Harris
#11. Politics? Boring? Politics is history on the wing! What other sphere of human activity calls forth all that is most noble in men's souls, and all that is most base? Or has such excitement? Or more vividly exposes our strengths and weaknesses? Boring? You might as well say that life itself is boring!
Robert Harris
#12. What is leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason
Robert Harris
#13. 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.
Robert Harris
#14. He was unable to get it out of his mind. Was it really possible that he had spent the past thirty years worshipping the church rather than God? Because that, in essence, was the accusation Benitez had leveled against him.
Robert Harris
#15. The natural impulse of men is to follow and whoever has the strongest sense of purpose will always dominate.
Robert Harris
#16. I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.
Robert Harris
#17. It's when you've stopped writing and are doing other things, especially when you're asleep, that the real work is done.
Robert Harris
#18. If you are afraid of wolves, keep out of the woods. - J. V. Stalin, 1936
Robert Harris
#20. Isn't an awareness of their transience what gives these moments their exquisite edge?
Robert Harris
#22. Tape is the archiving champ and has been for decades. Reliable, less expensive than disks and available in large-scale robotic systems that store petabytes.
Robert Harris
#23. Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.
Robert Harris
#24. If long hitting is the thing that causes the spectators to whistle through their teeth in wonderment, why not play tournaments up and down an expansive stadium?
Robert Harris
#25. We say, 'The market plummets,' like it's some roaring creature.
Robert Harris
#26. History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events.
Robert Harris
#27. To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend ... I suppose I ought to have realize it's ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.
Robert Harris
#28. My four golden principles are more important now than ever: take it one step at a time; approach the matter dispassionately; avoid a rush to judgement; confide in nobody until there is hard evidence.
Robert Harris
#29. The most important thing in any endeavour is to get involved in the fight, and in that way learn what to do next.
Robert Harris
#30. 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.
Robert Harris
#31. By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.
Robert Harris
#32. [Boxer is] the ultimate tool for the serious pro' that can't afford the time and patience to mess around with lesser products.
Robert Harris
#33. The true currency of life is time, not money, and we've all got a limited stock of that.
Robert Harris
#34. Writers of fiction should stick to writing, not pop up on panel shows or as a talking head.
Robert Harris
#35. He tried to visualise her apartment, but he couldn't do it, he didn't know enough about her.
Robert Harris
#36. Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name?
Robert Harris
#37. If you go back, 'The Great Gatsby' would be a portrait of the rich and fortune made by business.
Robert Harris
#38. I used to love politics. I can't say I do any more. All the fun has gone out of it. Each side is engaged in this trench warfare of managerialism. They're all too scared to say anything that might make them appear something other than completely bland.
Robert Harris
#40. I have put out my books and now my house has a soul.
Robert Harris
#41. 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.
Robert Harris
#42. It implies a slight failure as a writer that you are reduced to being a ghostwriter for the money.
Robert Harris
#43. Nowadays, of course, most senators employ a slave or two two out their speeches; I have even heard of some who have no idea of what they are going to say until the next is place in front of them; how these fellows can call themselves statesman defeats me
Robert Harris
#44. Social mores change all the time. In the mid-1970s, it would've been astonishing, say, to see two men holding hands in the streets. And the attitude to having a fling with a girl, or whatever, was quite different then.
Robert Harris
#45. To be brave, by definition, one has first to be afraid.
Robert Harris
#46. The art of life is to deal with one's problems as they arise; rather than destoy your spirit by worrying about them too far in advance.
Robert Harris
#47. What starts as gratitude quickly becomes dependency and ends as entitlement
Robert Harris
#48. 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.
Robert Harris
#49. I write as well as I can. I'm a journalist at heart, so it's the story that matters.
Robert Harris
#50. I see myself as the literary equivalent of a skilled lathe-operator, or a basket-weaver; a potter, maybe: I make mildly diverting objects that people want to buy.
Robert Harris
#51. Any man who is truly worthy must consider himself unworthy.
Robert Harris
#52. We are born in a clear field and die in a dark forest.
Robert Harris
#53. who had the advantage of seeming to be an American without the disadvantage of actually being one; and Adeyemi,
Robert Harris
#54. We live in an age of great jitteriness in the financial markets. And there's no doubt at all, I think, that the volume of computer-traded stocks has helped contribute to that.
Robert Harris
#55. The destination of the journey could not be altered, only the manner in which one approached it - whether one chose to walk erect or to be dragged complaining through the dust.
Robert Harris
#56. In the concealed darkness of the bag her fingers began to work her rosary, clumsily at first but with increasing dexterity - Push. Click. Slide. Press -
Robert Harris
#57. The kulaks were contagious. Their souls were contagious. They carried the spores of counter-revolution.
Robert Harris
#58. In the absence of genius there is always craftsmanship.
Robert Harris
#59. 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.
Robert Harris
#60. Unfortunately, freedom alone is not enough, by far. If there is a shortage of bread, a shortage of butter and fats, a shortage of textiles, and if housing conditions are bad, freedom will not carry you very far. It is very difficult, comrades, to live on freedom alone.
Robert Harris
#61. She had the resigned indifference of extreme old age. Buildings and empires rose and fell. It snowed. It stopped snowing. People came and went. One day death would come for her, and she would not find that surprising either, and she would not care -
Robert Harris
#62. Bachelors of forty are society's stray cats. We are taken in by households and fed and made a fuss of;
Robert Harris
#63. One cannot see any world leader who has got a grip on the financial markets these days. They're too big, too fast. I think that's quite scary.
Robert Harris
#64. 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?
Robert Harris
#65. It's easy enough to get into power. You can make promises and try to be all things to all people. But the moment you have to make decisions, you're going to annoy at least half of them. Whatever you do, in the end you're almost certain to be brought down by your own character traits.
Robert Harris
#66. Everyone thinks politics will just go on the way it is. I don't agree.
Robert Harris
#67. In fact fear is probably the strongest human emotion, period. Whoever woke at four in the morning because they were feeling happy?
Robert Harris
#68. the wise man never assumes anything, never regrets anything, is never wrong, never changes his mind.
Robert Harris
#69. 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.
Robert Harris
#70. Death solves all problems - no man, no problem. - J. V. Stalin, 1918
Robert Harris
#71. He felt more human with his boots on. A man can face the world with something on his feet.
Robert Harris
#72. To tell a good story and to illuminate the world: the two things are completely linked. That is the point. That is what I've always wanted to do.
Robert Harris
#73. I like to take people you wouldn't really think people would write novels about: an aqueduct engineer, a code-breaker, a hedge-fund manager. It's in those sorts of lives that I find more fascination than in a CIA operative or a Marine or something like that.
Robert Harris
#74. The financial markets tend to be just a backdrop for a novel, for a heist or something that isn't necessarily integral to it. On the whole, I don't think the financial world has been well served by novels.
Robert Harris
#76. Politics is never a victory, it's just the remorseless grinding forward of events.
Robert Harris
#77. Any rash fool can be a hero if he sets no value on his life, or hasn't the wit to appreciate danger. But to understand the risk, perhaps even to flinch at first, but then to summon the strength to face them down - that in my opinion is the most commendable form of valour
Robert Harris
#78. At that instant i knew there was no horror the world could offer - no war, no genocide, no famine, no childhood cancer - to which Sidney Kroll would not see the funny side
Robert Harris
#79. Writers and journalists tend to be simplistic about politics when, like all other areas of life, it's more complicated.
Robert Harris
#80. Unlike the Holocaust, Stalin's murders are forgotten: dust blowing in the wind.
Robert Harris
#81. This was the problem with drinks parties: getting stuck with a person you didn't want to talk to while someone you did was tantalisingly in view.
Robert Harris
#82. In the end, the only safe place to put a Trojan horse is outside your walls.
Robert Harris
#83. You cant build on a mass grave. Human beings are better than that - we have to be better than that - I do believe, don't you?" Charlie McGuire, Fatherland
Robert Harris
#84. 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.
Robert Harris
#85. Golf requires only a few simple Rules and Regulations to guide the players in the true nature of its sporting appeal. The spirit of the game is its own referee.
Robert Harris
#86. Politics is a country idiot capable of concentrating on only one thing at a time.
Robert Harris
#87. What fascinates people isn't policy- who cares about policy? What fascinates people is always people- the detail of another person's life.
Robert Harris
#88. A dog looks up to you, a cat looks down on you, but a pig looks you straight in the eye.
Robert Harris
#90. An excess of simplicity, after all, was just another form of ostentation, and pride in one's humility a sin.
Robert Harris
#91. People will perish, but books are immortal. (Pompeii)
Robert Harris
#92. It was an unnatural time to be awake, ... It meant nothing good. He associated it with emergency, bereavement, conspiracy, flight; the sad skulk away at the end of a one-night affair.
Robert Harris
#93. Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually. - Pg. 195
Robert Harris
#94. The Greek philosopher Epictetus recognised this two thousand years ago when he wrote: 'What disturbs and alarms man are not the things but his opinions and fancies about the things.
Robert Harris
#95. A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it's halfway to being just like every other bloody book that's ever been written.
Robert Harris
#96. No one who ever follows their conscience ever does wrong. The consequences may not turn out as we intended; it may prove that we made a mistake. But that is not the same as being wrong.
Robert Harris
#97. Cicero smiled at us. 'The art of life is to deal with problems as they arise, rather than destory one's spirit by worrying about them too far in advance. Especially tonight.
Robert Harris
#98. There are occasions when losing is a victory, so long as there is a fight.
Robert Harris
#100. A voice came out of the darkness.
'Don't make it so wide. It's not a grave. You're making work for yourself.
Robert Harris
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