Top 120 Robert Harris Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “If you spend too long trying to avoid death, you will be dead in at least one way.”

— Robert Harris

52. “How odd it is, thought March afterwards, to live your life in ignorance of the past, of your world, yourself. Yet how easy to do it! You went along from day to day, down paths other people had prepared for you, never raising your head – enfolded in their logic, from swaddling clothes to shroud. It was a kind of fear. Well, goodbye to that. And good to leave it behind – whatever happened now. – 214.”

— Robert Harris

53. “Cicero most reminds me of Harold Wilson. Both men knew how to keep the show on the road.”

— Robert Harris

54. “Power depended on being in the room when the decisions were taken.”

— Robert Harris

55. “I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety.”

— Robert Harris

56. “My greatest regret as a writer is that I’ve never been able to include as many jokes as I’d like.”

— Robert Harris

57. “Tape is the archiving champ and has been for decades. Reliable, less expensive than disks and available in large-scale robotic systems that store petabytes.”

— Robert Harris

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

— Robert Harris

59. “In a generation or two, or maybe sooner, young golfers of true sporting instinct will wonder why all this handling of the ball is necessary. It will seem to them that the game is not as good as it might be.”

— Robert Harris

60. “But only a fool sails into combat with nature.”

— Robert Harris

61. “You find out what you think by talking to yourself.”

— Robert Harris

62. “But it is one of the tricks of the successful politician to be able to hold many things in mind at once and to switch between them as the need arises;.”

— Robert Harris

63. “In the end, the only safe place to put a Trojan horse is outside your walls.”

— Robert Harris

64. “You can always spot a fool, for he is the man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election. But an election is a living thing – you might almost say, the most vigorously alive thing there is – with thousands upon thousands of brains and limbs and eyes and thoughts and desires, and it will wriggle and turn and run off in directions no one ever predicted, sometimes just for the joy of proving the wiseacres wrong.”

— Robert Harris

65. “This is the nightmare I have always dreaded. It’s as if we’ve learned nothing from the last war and we are reliving August 1914. One by one the countries of the world will be dragged in – and for what?”

— Robert Harris

66. “History has always fascinated me. As Cicero himself once wrote: ‘To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?’ I quickly forgot the cold and could have spent all day happily unwinding that roll, poring over the events of more than sixty years before.”

— Robert Harris

67. “That so many people can derive so much pleasure from such a revolting spectacle,” he said to me when he returned home that night, “almost makes one doubt the very premise on which democracy is based.” But he was pleased nevertheless that the masses now thought of him as a good sport, as well as “the Scholar” and “the Greek.”

— Robert Harris

68. “The Greek philosopher Epictetus recognised this two thousand years ago when he wrote: ‘What disturbs and alarms man are not the things but his opinions and fancies about the things.”

— Robert Harris

69. “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

70. “Officially it was almost spring but someone had forgotten to pass the news on to winter.”

— Robert Harris

71. “Everyone thinks politics will just go on the way it is. I don’t agree.”

— Robert Harris

72. “The corridor was grand and lofty in the Victorian imperial style, its extravagance calculated to awe those visitors whose misfortune it was not to be born British.”

— Robert Harris

73. “It seemed to me at the time – and still does now, only even more so – an act of madness for a man to pursue power when he could be sitting in the sunshine and reading a book.”

— Robert Harris

74. “A ghost who has only a lay knowledge of the subject will be able to keep asking the same questions as the lay reader, and will therefore open up the potential readership of the book to a much wider audience.”

— Robert Harris

75. “If I were convinced that any nation had made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of its force, I should feel that it must be resisted. Under such a domination, life for people who believe in liberty would not be worth living. But war is a fearful thing, and we must be very clear, before we embark on it, that it is really the great issues that are at stake, and that the call to risk everything in their defence, when all the consequences are weighed, is irresistible.”

— Robert Harris

76. “Truth was like any other material necessary for the making of war: it had to be beaten and bent and cut into the required shape.”

— Robert Harris

77. “My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected.”

— Robert Harris

78. “My four golden principles are more important now than ever: take it one step at a time; approach the matter dispassionately; avoid a rush to judgement; confide in nobody until there is hard evidence.”

— Robert Harris

79. “It implies a slight failure as a writer that you are reduced to being a ghostwriter for the money.”

— Robert Harris

80. “Humans have changed little over time. We think we’ve invented the modern world but they were making better speeches 2,000 years ago and grappling with issues of empire and terrorism.”

— Robert Harris

81. “There are no lasting victories in politics, there is only the remorseless grinding forward of events.”

— Robert Harris

82. “I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.”

— Robert Harris

83. “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.”

— Robert Harris

84. “You can’t make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.”

— Robert Harris

85. “What she needed was someone who would take her for the whole night. Someone decent and respectable, with an apartment of his own. But how could you ever judge what men were really like? It was the young ones with the swaggering walks and the loud mouths who ended up bursting into tears and showing you pictures of their girlfriends. It was the bespectacled bankers and lawyers who liked to knock you around.”

— Robert Harris

86. “I think it’s very, very hard not to go slightly crazy if you’re in the top in politics – especially if you’re there for a long time.”

— Robert Harris

87. “I lay aside the papers. Really, it is beyond hypocrisy; it is beyond even lying: it has become a psychosis.”

— Robert Harris

88. “Really, take it from me: it is always the unknown that is most frightening.”

— Robert Harris

89. “I’ve always just wanted to earn my living by writing. The best thing is to go into my study in the morning and put words together.”

— Robert Harris

90. “Time. Now here is a peculiar commodity, boy. The measurement of time. Best accomplished, obviously, with a watch. But, lacking a watch, a man may use instead the ebb and flow of light and dark. Lacking, however, a window through which to see such movement, the reliance must be devolved upon some inner mechanism of the mind. But if the mind has received a shock, the mechanism is disturbed, and time becomes as the ground is to a drunkard, variable.”

— Robert Harris

91. “Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.”

— Robert Harris

92. “That young man seeks opportunities to test his principles as readily as a drunk picks fights in a bar.”

— Robert Harris

93. “Any man who is truly worthy must consider himself unworthy.”

— Robert Harris

94. “He lived alone, in a small house full of books, and did nothing all day except read and think – a most dangerous occupation for a man, which in my experience leads invariably to dyspepsia and melancholy.”

— Robert Harris

95. “He felt more human with his boots on. A man can face the world with something on his feet.”

— Robert Harris

96. “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.”

— Robert Harris

97. “It’s when you’ve stopped writing and are doing other things, especially when you’re asleep, that the real work is done.”

— Robert Harris

98. “And when did the catastrophe occur?’ ‘Three years later, in two thousand and twenty-five.’ ‘In what.”

— Robert Harris

99. “It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you’re forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else.”

— Robert Harris

100. “Let us drink to pointless heroism.”

— Robert Harris