Robert Harris

“Quod volimus credimus libenterwe always believe what we want to believe”

“more enemies, more honour.”

“To choose one's victims, to prepare one's plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed ... there is nothing sweeter in the world. - J. V. Stalin”

“Where was the respect? The boys all looked like girls and the girls all looked like whores. Clearly, the country was already halfway in the shit.”

“His scars and his tattoos were the medals of his lifetime. He was proud to wear them.”

“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.”

“Death solves all problems - no man, no problem. - J. V. Stalin, 1918”

“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.”

“Right, you see that girl over there, the one in that group that keeps looking right at you?'...'Right, let's say I'm convinced she's wearing black knickers - she looks like a black knickers kind of gal to me - and I'm so sure that's what she's wearing, so positive of that sartorial fact, I want to bet a million dollars on it. The trouble is, if I'm wrong, I'm wiped out. So I also bet she's wearing knickers that aren't black, but are any one of a whole basket of colours - let's say I put nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars on that possibility: that's the rest of the market; that's the hedge. This is a crude example, okay, in every sense, but hear me out. Now if I'm right, I make fifty K, but even if I'm wrong I'm going to lose fifty K, because I'm hedged. And because ninety-five per cent of my million dollars is not in use - I'm never going to be called on to show it: the only risk is in the spread - I can make similar bets with other people. Or I can bet it on something else entirely. And the beauty of it is I don't have to be right all the time - if I can just get the colour of her underwear right fifty-five per cent of the time I'm going to wind up very rich...”

“You can always spot a fool, for he is a man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election.”

“Travel is sold as freedom, but we were about as free as lab rats. This is how they'll manage the next Holocaust, I thought, as I shuffled forward in my stockinged feet: they'll simply issue us with air tickets and we'll do whatever we're told”

“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.”

“Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too hot, too cold, too early, too late. I had learned over the years to ignore them all, and simply to start.”

“Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called ‘heightened interrogation’. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated the presence of a doctor.”

“Tak usah cemas, akan banyak waktu untuk tidur setelah kita mati.”

“Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.”

“By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.”

“People will perish, but books are immortal. (Pompeii)”

“What was leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason?”

“And the great thing about money is that it doesn’t matter when you harvest it. It’s an all-year crop.”

“To be brave, by definition, one has first to be afraid.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”