Forthbridge > Forthbridge's Quotes

“He believed in the unarguable notion that if a young person is lucky enough to read the right books at the right time in the company of the right teacher, it will change their life forever.”
― Charles Cumming, The Trinity Six

“I am not anti-American,' he said. 'I just despise the current American administration. I despair that Bush has made ordinary, decent people all over the world think twice about what was once, and still could be again, a great country, when what happened on September 11th should have made ordinary, decent people all over the world embrace America as never before. I don't like it that neo-conservative politicians bully their so-called allies while playing to the worst, racist instincts of their own bewildered electorate. I don't like it that we live in an era where to be anti-war is to be anti-American, to be pro-Palestine is to be anti-Semitic, to be critical of Blair is somehow to be supportive of Putin and Chirac. All anybody is asking for in this so-called age of terror is some leadership. Yet everywhere you look in public life there is no truth, no courage, no dignity to speak of.”
― Charles Cumming, Typhoon

“A prude is a person who thinks that his own rules of propriety are natural laws.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I’m a European, Peter. If I had a mission – if I was ever aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.”
― John le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“The policemen agreed they were living with a most peculiar fellow. One moment he was reading classical literature in the original French and quoting Tennyson, and the next he would be discussing the best way to blow up a train.”
― Ben MacIntyre, Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal

“Britain might be in the grip of rationing, but buying the materials for a homemade bomb was a piece of cake. (In fact, obtaining the ingredients for a decent cake would have been rather harder.)”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal

“War is too messy to produce easy heroes and villains; there are always brave people on the wrong side, and evil men among the victors, and a mass of perfectly ordinary people struggling to survive and understand in between. Away from the battlefields, war forces individuals to make impossible choices in circumstances they did not create, and could never have expected. Most accommodate, some collaborate, and a very few find an internal compass they never knew they had, pointing to the right path.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal

“Well you stick the dynamite in the keyhole and you don't damage the safe, only sometimes you put a little too much in and blow the safe door up, but other times you're lucky and the safe just comes open.
Thus the scion of a great banking dynasty learned how to rob a bank.”
― Ben MacIntyre, Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal

“One night, the Carlton Club was hit by a bomb. The members of the surrounding clubs, in pajamas and slippers, formed long lines to save the library from the flames, passing books from hand to hand and discussing the merits of each as they passed. Such”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal

“Quisling, vague, inefficient, and fanatical, won the rare distinction of being so closely associated with a single characteristic—treachery—that a noun was created in his name. At”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal

“Clearly, their application had been rejected, or merely ignored, on the longstanding principle that anyone who applies to join an espionage service should be rejected.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal

“you see, and the folly of sitting smug in judgment years after, stuffed with piety and ignorance and book-learned bias. Humanity is beastly and stupid, aye, and helpless, and there’s an end to it.”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman and the Redskins

“That guttural, hissing mumble, with all its “Tz” and “zl” and “rr” noises, like a drunk Scotch-Jew having trouble with his false teeth, is something you don’t forget in a hurry. So”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman and the Redskins