Top 150 David Baldacci Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Twain had found Palestine to be very tiny, writing that he “could not conceive of a small country having so large a history.”

— David Baldacci

52. “I’d read a lot of thrillers about politicians and presidents, but never one where you flip the stereotypes and make good people bad and bad people good.”

— David Baldacci

53. “We cannot live without memories, but we cannot live within them either.”

— David Baldacci

54. “Everyone has choices. You make them and then you live with the consequences.”

— David Baldacci

55. “I’m tired of people screaming about price and forgetting about the content.”

— David Baldacci

56. “Decker shook his head and stood. “It goes beyond mere eccentricity. She also has a run-down farmhouse and a crappy car that she drives to work and on her rounds as the proverbial Good Samaritan.” “What does that tell you?” “If you were a spy and had.”

— David Baldacci

57. “I can be fat or I can smoke. I can’t be both.” They.”

— David Baldacci

58. “Politics is a dirty, ruthless business, Agent Robie. It makes the intelligence sector look relatively honorable by comparison.”

— David Baldacci

59. “But protagonists are protagonists and heroes are heroes.”

— David Baldacci

60. “You know what kind of person it takes to run for President? Not normal. They could start out okay, but by the time they reach that level they’ve sold their soul to the devil so many times and stomped the guts out of enough people that they are definitely not like you and me, not even close.”

— David Baldacci

61. “In his trip to Bethlehem Mark Twain had reported that all sects of Christians, except Protestants, had chapels under the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. However, he also observed that one group dared not trespass on the other’s territory, proving beyond doubt, he noted, that even the grave of the Savior couldn’t inspire peaceful worship among different beliefs.”

— David Baldacci

62. “It was not known precisely how many labor camps there were in North Korea, although the international consensus was six. The fact that they were numbered and those numbers reached at least as high as twenty-two was an indicator of their pervasiveness. At least two hundred thousand North Koreans, or nearly one percent of the entire population, called these labor camps home.”

— David Baldacci

63. “It is asking a lot. But when you’re attempting to do something truly extraordinary, isn’t it fair to ask a lot in return?”

— David Baldacci

64. “Two people can care for each other but not want the same things.”

— David Baldacci

65. “I can write with a crying child on my lap. I have. Often.”

— David Baldacci

66. “Planning something never seems risky. It’s in the execution where all the risk comes.” “And.”

— David Baldacci

67. “Anyone who’s lived has lost somebody.”

— David Baldacci

68. “Most people associate reading with laying on the beach. They don’t see that it’s crucial for a democracy!”

— David Baldacci

69. “Justice. It wasn’t about the greater good. It was about what was right and wrong on an individual basis. Person by person. Because if you neglected the people, the idea of a greater good was a pipe dream created by those whose idea of the “greater good” almost always tended to favor themselves and people like them.”

— David Baldacci

70. “In fact, something always leads to something else.”

— David Baldacci

71. “Life had coincidences. Serendipity abounded. Wrong place, wrong time. It came as the result of seven billion people jostling each other within the span of a single planet. But there was an unwritten rule in police work: There are no coincidences. All you needed was more in-depth investigation to show that there are no coincidences.”

— David Baldacci

72. “Things sometimes did not work out. Even if you wanted them to more than anything else. You couldn’t will someone to love you back. You had to move on.”

— David Baldacci

73. “Find something to believe in, Carter, other than your work. Because when you leave this life, you leave work behind. If that’s all you have, then you have nothing. And eternity is a long time for nothing.”

— David Baldacci

74. “What grade does she teach?” “Eighth. Where kids make the jump from nice, innocent kids to something a lot more complicated and emotional drama runs deep and hormones are out of control. Some days she comes home looking like she got hit by a bus.” “In my book, all teachers are underpaid,” said Decker.”

— David Baldacci

75. “Kids make everything better. And harder.”

— David Baldacci

76. “Complacency by the masses is my greatest weapon.”

— David Baldacci

77. “It takes courage to speak your heart, when others do not want you to.”

— David Baldacci

78. “Just know that one answer over the other does not equal a solution. It’s only a decision.”

— David Baldacci

79. “People like to talk about other people’s misery; it makes them feel their own life is somehow better when it usually isn’t.”

— David Baldacci

80. “Diamond Skinner had had no material possessions to his name and yet had been the happiest creature Lou had ever met. He and God would no doubt get along famously.”

— David Baldacci

81. “At the end of a lifetime’s worth of lights and nights, it seemed that family was really the only important thing there was. And yet how many of us truly appreciated that significance before our last breath left us?”

— David Baldacci

82. “As a lawyer, as a private citizen, you see a lot of injustice.”

— David Baldacci

83. “The narcissist could not feel empathy toward others. Which meant that the lives of others held no value to a narcissist. Killing could even be like a hit of fentanyl: instant euphoria from the domination and destruction of another. That was why virtually every serial murderer was also a narcissist.”

— David Baldacci

84. “That was the way it was, the burial ritual. You set them in the earth and walked away to keep living, until it was your turn to be left behind.”

— David Baldacci

85. “Lying caused a physiological reaction that cut the flow of blood to the capillaries located at the end of the nose. It caused a tingling feeling that usually made the liar rub at the spot.”

— David Baldacci

86. “He knew exactly what it was like to lose a child. And that fact wouldn’t matter in the least in this circumstance. There could be no commiseration among such people despite the seeming commonality of loss, because it was actually each parent’s totally unique hell.”

— David Baldacci

87. “The motorcades drifted down the street with Canadian police providing the traffic security. There were a number of Canadian Mounties on their horses; they looked resplendent in their red uniforms. But they were also brightly colored sitting ducks when it came to an actual armed confrontation.”

— David Baldacci

88. “She’d heard that the author Margaret Mitchell had never lived in a place with more than one bedroom for a simple reason: She had never wanted houseguests.”

— David Baldacci

89. “You had to take life as it came. It gave no quarter, spared no feelings. Limited no pain. Put no ceiling on happiness.”

— David Baldacci

90. “If it’s not, it’s a coincidence the size of Russia.” “And you don’t believe in even small coincidences, I know.” He looked at the cup of tea, picked it up, and took a sip. “Todd ran the plate on the Camaro.” Jamison stiffened. “And?” “And it was stolen from a couple who live in Woodbridge.”

— David Baldacci

91. “His jumpsuit was white, and on the back were the letters D and R printed in black. They stood for “death row”. Mars had equated it to a snake’s rattle, warning folks to stay the hell away.”

— David Baldacci

92. “Why was it he was more comfortable with the dead than the living? The answer was relatively simple. The dead conveniently never asked questions.”

— David Baldacci

93. “Nothing, absolutely nothing, was above corruption so long as human beings were involved.”

— David Baldacci

94. “Give an economist a result you want, and he’ll find the numbers to justify it.”

— David Baldacci

95. “Woe be to the wug who forgets that destroying one part of a thing does not equal victory.”

— David Baldacci

96. “I’m scattered, and then that last hundred pages, bam, I’m a laser.”

— David Baldacci

97. “More guns! No guns! Second Amendment! Guns kill! No, people kill!”

— David Baldacci

98. “Everybody’s got somewhere to go. Just takes some folks longer to figure out where to.”

— David Baldacci

99. “They made you hate everyone, even the ones who were like you. That is what they do, so the prisoners will not rise up against them.”

— David Baldacci

100. “The place smelled of sweat and burned coffee and the passage of time, which held its own moldy stink.”

— David Baldacci