Top 120 Robert Harris Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The true currency of life is time, not money, and we’ve all got a limited stock of that.”

— Robert Harris

2. “A police state is a country run by criminals.”

— Robert Harris

3. “You can’t ever win the war on crime, or the war on terror. You can’t repeal human nature.”

— Robert Harris

4. “Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.”

— Robert Harris

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

— Robert Harris

6. “If you go back, ‘The Great Gatsby’ would be a portrait of the rich and fortune made by business.”

— Robert Harris

7. “What starts as gratitude quickly becomes dependency and ends as entitlement.”

— Robert Harris

8. “Golf requires only a few simple Rules and Regulations to guide the players in the true nature of its sporting appeal. The spirit of the game is its own referee.”

— Robert Harris

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

— Robert Harris

10. “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

11. “The financial world is at the cutting edge of high technology.”

— Robert Harris

12. “Don’t try to write too much in a single session. One thousand words a day is quite enough. Stop after about four or five hours.”

— Robert Harris

13. “The fact is, as the proverb says, before you can cook your rabbit you first have to catch it.”

— Robert Harris

14. “Anyone found not enjoying themselves will be shot.”

— Robert Harris

15. “In a way I’m almost more rueful about the notion of having a non-ideological Labour party than I am about the personality of Tony Blair.”

— Robert Harris

16. “All civilisations consider themselves invulnerable; history warns us that none is.”

— Robert Harris

17. “In the absence of genius there is always craftsmanship.”

— Robert Harris

18. “Storytelling has a narcotic power.”

— Robert Harris

19. “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

20. “And so we drifted towards calamity. At times, Cicero was shrewd enough to see it. “Can a constitution devised centuries ago to replace a monarchy, and based upon a citizens’ militia, possibly hope to run an empire whose scope is beyond anything ever dreamed of by its framers? Or must the existence of standing armies and the influx of inconceivable wealth inevitably destroy our democratic system?”

— Robert Harris

21. “What fascinates people isn’t policy- who cares about policy? What fascinates people is always people- the detail of another person’s life.”

— Robert Harris

22. “I write as well as I can. I’m a journalist at heart, so it’s the story that matters.”

— Robert Harris

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23. “History is too important to be left to the historians.”

— Robert Harris

24. “If one first gives himself to the Lord, all other giving is easy.”

— Robert Harris

25. “I have put out my books and now my house has a soul.”

— Robert Harris

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

— Robert Harris

27. “Working 14 hours a day until you’re 55 and missing your kids growing up is not what I would consider a recipe for happiness.”

— Robert Harris

28. “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.”

— Robert Harris

29. “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

30. “You cant build on a mass grave. Human beings are better than that – we have to be better than that – I do believe, don’t you?” Charlie McGuire, Fatherland.”

— Robert Harris

31. “There is a wonderful line in one of Cicero’s letters to Atticus in which he describes moving into a property and says: I have put out my books and now my house has a soul.”

— Robert Harris

32. “The natural impulse of men is to follow and whoever has the strongest sense of purpose will always dominate.”

— Robert Harris

33. “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

34. “Well, well – be careful of what questions you ask, for fear of what answers you may receive.”

— Robert Harris

35. “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

36. “Politics is a country idiot capable of concentrating on only one thing at a time.”

— Robert Harris

37. “Violence crackled around him in the dry air, like static electricity.”

— Robert Harris

38. “His theory of oratory, the exact opposite of the Asiatics’, was simple: don’t move about too much, hold your head straight, stick to the point, make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, and when you’ve won their sympathy, sit down quickly –.”

— Robert Harris

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

— Robert Harris

40. “All that will remain of us is what is written down.”

— Robert Harris

41. “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

42. “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

43. “Politics is never a victory, it’s just the remorseless grinding forward of events.”

— Robert Harris

44. “The Spartan statesman Lycurgus, seven hundred years ago, is said to have observed: When falls on man the anger of the gods, First from his mind they banish understanding. Such was to be the fate of Caesar. I am sure Cicero was correct: he had gone mad. His success had made him vain, and his vanity had devoured his reason.”

— Robert Harris

45. “Against the alchemy of two naked bodies in a bed in the darkness, and against all the complex longings and attachments and commitments such intimacy might arouse, he had nothing with which to fight.”

— Robert Harris

46. “Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually. – Pg. 195.”

— Robert Harris

47. “But popularity and power, as he well knew, are separate entities. Often the most powerful men in a state can pass down a street unrecognised, while the most famous bask in feted impotence.”

— Robert Harris

48. “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

49. “Sometimes it is foolish to articulate an ambition too early – exposing it prematurely to the laughter and skepticism of the world can destroy it before it is even properly born. But sometimes the opposite occurs, and the very act of mentioning a thing makes it suddenly seem possible, even plausible.”

— Robert Harris

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

— Robert Harris