236 Quotes by Robert Harris

Anyone found not enjoying themselves will be shot.

But popularity and power, as he well knew, are separate entities. Often the most powerful men in a state can pass down a street unrecognised, while the most famous bask in feted impotence.

And people would believe it, thought Hartmann, because people believed what they wanted to believe – that was Goebbels’s great insight. They no longer had any need to bother themselves with inconvenient truths. He had given them an excuse not to think.

A police state is a country run by criminals.

And when did the catastrophe occur?’ ‘Three years later, in two thousand and twenty-five.’ ‘In what.

Suddenly his face twisted into a sneer. ‘Oh, I can see what you’re thinking, Hartmann. “What a vulgar fellow! A car salesman! And now he fancies himself as a second Bismarck!” But we have done something your kind never managed. We have made Germany great again.’ ‘Actually,’ said Hartmann mildly, ‘I was thinking you have egg on your chin.

You can’t ever win the war on crime, or the war on terror. You can’t repeal human nature.

Everybody tends to heighten his own reality. We start with a private fantasy about our lives and perhaps one day, for fun, we turn it into an anecdote. No harm is done. Over the years, the anecdote is repeated so regularly it becomes accepted as a fact. Quite soon, to contradict this fact would be embarrassing. In time, we probably come to believe it was true all along. And by these slow accretions of myth, like a coral reef, the historical record takes shape.

Everyone thinks politics will just go on the way it is. I don’t agree.