Robert Harris > Quotes

“To be brave, by definition, one has first to be afraid.”
― Robert Harris, Pompeii

“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.”
― Robert Harris, The Ghost

“My brothers and sisters, in the course of a long life in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end. 'Eli Eli, lama sabachtani?' He cried out in His agony at the ninth hour on the cross. 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.”
― Robert Harris, Conclave

“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.”
― Robert Harris, The Ghost

“....let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end........Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.”
― Robert Harris, Conclave

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

“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.”
― Robert Harris, Imperium

“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”
― Robert Harris, Pompeii

“A police state is a country run by criminals”
― Robert Harris, Fatherland

“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.”
― Robert Harris, Conclave

“Any man who is truly worthy must consider himself unworthy.”
― Robert Harris, Conclave

“But only a fool sails into combat with nature”
― Robert Harris, Pompeii

“People perish. Books are immortal.”
― Robert Harris, Pompeii

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

“An excess of simplicity, after all, was just another form of ostentation, and pride in one’s humility a sin.”
― Robert Harris, Conclave

“...it has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the mediocre...”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“Men mistook measurement for understanding. And they always had to put themselves at the center of everything. That was their greatest conceit. The earth is becoming warmer-it must be our fault! The mountain is destroying us-we have not propitiated the gods! It rains too much, it rains too little-a comfort to think that these things are somehow connected to our behavior, that if only we lived a little better, a little more frugally, our virtue would be rewarded. But here was nature, sweeping toward him-unknowable, all-conquering, indifferent-and he saw in her fires the futility of human pretensions.”
― Robert Harris, Pompeii

“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.”
― Robert Harris, The Ghost

“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.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

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

“Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually.”
― Robert Harris, Pompeii

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

“It is perseverance, and not genius that takes a man to the top. Rome is full of unrecognized geniuses. Only perseverance enables you to move forward in the world.”
― Robert Harris, Imperium

“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.”
― Robert Harris, Imperium

“This is what I have learned these past six years, as opposed to what is taught in Oxford: the power of unreason. Everyone said—by everyone I mean people like me—we all said, ‘Oh, he’s a terrible fellow, Hitler, but he’s not necessarily all bad. Look at his achievements. Put aside this awful medieval anti-Jew stuff: it will pass.’ But the point is, it won’t pass. You can’t isolate it from the rest. It’s there in the mix. And if the anti-Semitism is evil, it’s all evil. Because if they’re capable of that, they’re capable of anything.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“The destination of the journey could not be altered, only the manner in which one approached it - whether one chose to walk erect or to be dragged complaining through the dust.”
― Robert Harris, Pompeii

“All good books are different but all bad books are exactly the same. I know this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot of bad books - books so bad they aren't even published, which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published.
And what they all have in common, these bad books, be they novels or memoirs, is this: they don't ring true. I'm not saying that a good book is true necessarily, just that it feels true for the time you're reading it.”
― Robert Harris, The Ghost

“Surely the greatest mercy granted us by Providence is our ignorance of the future. Imagine if we knew the outcome of our hopes and plans, or could see the manner in which we are doomed to die - how ruined our lives would be! Instead we live on dumbly from day to day as happily as animals. But all things must come to dust eventually. No human being, no system, no age is impervious to this law; everything beneath the stars will perish; the hardest rock will be worn away. Nothing endures but words.”
― Robert Harris, Lustrum

“Politics? Boring? Politics is history on the wing! What other sphere of human activity calls forth all that is most noble in men's souls, and all that is most base? Or has such excitement? Or more vividly exposes our strengths and weaknesses? Boring? You might as well say that life itself is boring!”
― Robert Harris, Imperium

“What do you do,’ he said, ‘if you devote your life to discovering criminals, and it gradually occurs to you that the real criminals are the people you work for? What do you do when everyone tells you not to worry, you can’t do anything about it, it was a long time ago?’ She was looking at him in a different way. ‘I suppose you go crazy.’ ‘Or worse. Sane.”
― Robert Harris, Fatherland