236 Quotes by Robert Harris

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.

He lived alone, in a small house full of books, and did nothing all day except read and think – a most dangerous occupation for a man, which in my experience leads invariably to dyspepsia and melancholy.

If you go back, ‘The Great Gatsby’ would be a portrait of the rich and fortune made by business.

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.

All civilisations consider themselves invulnerable; history warns us that none is.

But it is one of the tricks of the successful politician to be able to hold many things in mind at once and to switch between them as the need arises;.

I think it’s very, very hard not to go slightly crazy if you’re in the top in politics – especially if you’re there for a long time.

In a way I’m almost more rueful about the notion of having a non-ideological Labour party than I am about the personality of Tony Blair.

March had a routine for reading the paper. He started at the back, with the truth. If Leipzig was said to have beaten Cologne four-nil at football, the chances were it was true: even the Party had yet to devise a means of rewriting the sports results. The sports news was a different matter. COUNTDOWN.