236 Quotes by Robert Harris

There are no lasting victories in politics, there is only the remorseless grinding forward of events.

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.

This is the nightmare I have always dreaded. It’s as if we’ve learned nothing from the last war and we are reliving August 1914. One by one the countries of the world will be dragged in – and for what?

Let us drink to pointless heroism.

Politics is never a victory, it’s just the remorseless grinding forward of events.

Officially it was almost spring but someone had forgotten to pass the news on to winter.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history? Cicero, Orator, 46 BC.

History was a patchwork of voids. The great university libraries and public archives had mostly rotted away or been used as fuel in the Dark Age. An entire generation’s correspondence and memories had vanished into this mysterious entity the antiquarians called ‘The Cloud’.

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.