236 Quotes by Robert Harris

You can’t make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.

It had been a futile gesture, of course, but then they were trapped in an era when futile gestures were all that were available.

I am not a pacifist. The main lesson I have learned in my dealings with Hitler is that one simply can’t play poker with a gangster if one has no cards in one’s hand.

You were too young to fight in the last war, and I was too old. In some ways that made it worse.

An excess of simplicity, after all, was just another form of ostentation, and pride in one’s humility a sin.

All that will remain of us is what is written down.

The corridor was grand and lofty in the Victorian imperial style, its extravagance calculated to awe those visitors whose misfortune it was not to be born British.

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.

The old days of an inner circle of like-minded souls communicating with parchment and quill pens are gone. Sooner or later most things will be revealed.