Top 140 Robert Harris Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “If long hitting is the thing that causes the spectators to whistle through their teeth in wonderment, why not play tournaments up and down an expansive stadium?”

— Robert Harris

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

— Robert Harris

104. “Egyptologists, skilled in piecing together the papyri of lost civilisations, suddenly discovered that the same talent could be applied to working out the pattern of German radio traffic.”

— Robert Harris

105. “And people would believe it, thought Hartmann, because people believed what they wanted to believe – that was Goebbels’s great insight. They no longer had any need to bother themselves with inconvenient truths. He had given them an excuse not to think.”

— Robert Harris

106. “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? Cicero, Orator, 46 BC.”

— Robert Harris

107. “History was a patchwork of voids. The great university libraries and public archives had mostly rotted away or been used as fuel in the Dark Age. An entire generation’s correspondence and memories had vanished into this mysterious entity the antiquarians called ‘The Cloud’.”

— Robert Harris

108. “One cannot see any world leader who has got a grip on the financial markets these days. They’re too big, too fast. I think that’s quite scary.”

— Robert Harris

109. “Everybody tends to heighten his own reality. We start with a private fantasy about our lives and perhaps one day, for fun, we turn it into an anecdote. No harm is done. Over the years, the anecdote is repeated so regularly it becomes accepted as a fact. Quite soon, to contradict this fact would be embarrassing. In time, we probably come to believe it was true all along. And by these slow accretions of myth, like a coral reef, the historical record takes shape.”

— Robert Harris

110. “The old days of an inner circle of like-minded souls communicating with parchment and quill pens are gone. Sooner or later most things will be revealed.”

— Robert Harris

111. “History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events.”

— Robert Harris

112. “It had been a futile gesture, of course, but then they were trapped in an era when futile gestures were all that were available.”

— Robert Harris

113. “Suddenly his face twisted into a sneer. ‘Oh, I can see what you’re thinking, Hartmann. “What a vulgar fellow! A car salesman! And now he fancies himself as a second Bismarck!” But we have done something your kind never managed. We have made Germany great again.’ ‘Actually,’ said Hartmann mildly, ‘I was thinking you have egg on your chin.”

— Robert Harris

114. “The line between accident and suicide isn’t always clearly defined. You could kill yourself without really making up your mind.”

— Robert Harris

115. “Since when has idiocy been a bar to advancement in politics?”

— Robert Harris

116. “This is the trouble with internet research, in my experience. The proportion of what’s useful to what’s dross dwindles very quickly, and suddenly it’s like searching for something dropped down the back of a sofa and coming up with handfuls of old coins, buttons, fluff, and sucked sweets. What’s important is to ask the right question, and.”

— Robert Harris

117. “So,” said Ruth, “how bad is it?” “You haven’t read it?” “Not all of it.” “Well,” I said, politely, “it needs some work.” “How much?” The words “Hiroshima” and “nineteen forty-five” floated briefly into my mind. “It’s fixable,” I said, which I suppose it was: even Hiroshima was fixed eventually.”

— Robert Harris

118. “I feel as if I have walked into a mirrored room and glimpsed myself from an unfamiliar angle for the first time. Is that really what I look like? Is that who I am?”

— Robert Harris

119. “What a heap of ash most political careers amount to, when one really stops to consider them!”

— Robert Harris

120. “The library was destroyed years back. My father-in-law used to say nothing burned so well on a cold winter’s night as a good book.”

— Robert Harris

121. “So I have a choice: either I am an investigator in that uniform, and try to do a little good; or I am something else without that uniform, and do no good at all.”

— Robert Harris

122. “Problems do not queue up outside a statesman’s door, waiting to be solved in an orderly fashion, chapter by chapter, as the books would have us believe; instead they crowd in en masse, demanding attention.”

— Robert Harris

123. “As if earthquakes aren’t as much a part of living in Campania as hot springs and summer droughts!”

— Robert Harris

124. “I did not have long to enjoy my freedom in tranquillity. My modest plans, like everyone else’s, were about to be mocked by the immensity of events. As Plautus has it: Whatever the mind may hope for The future is in the hands of the gods.”

— Robert Harris

125. “Learned minds can still believe wicked things, especially when their own interests are at stake.”

— Robert Harris

126. “The vulgar always assumed it was best to try to know everything; in his experience it was often better to know as little as possible. “Before.”

— Robert Harris

127. “Sometimes,” he said, summing up the discussion with an aphorism I have never forgotten, “if you find yourself stuck in politics, the thing to do is start a fight – start a fight, even if you do not know how you are going to win it, because it is only when a fight is on, and everything is in motion, that you can hope to see your way through.”

— Robert Harris

128. “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

129. “It is in the nature of things that not all politicians can achieve greatness.”

— Robert Harris

130. “It was like having a child forever at your heels – a persistent, intelligent, embarrassing, deceitful, dangerous child.”

— Robert Harris

131. “Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.”

— Robert Harris

132. “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

133. “I told you this would happen. I am Cassandra – doomed to see the future yet destined never to be believed.”

— Robert Harris

134. “What sin therefore did she have to confess? Where was her guilt? And yet carrying the burden of it had been the ruin of her life.”

— Robert Harris

135. “It was not quite seven and Berlin was alive with possibilities the day had yet to dull.”

— Robert Harris

136. “One could never be sure with Oliver. Ambition and godliness, self-interest and the higher cause, the base metal entwined with the gold.”

— Robert Harris

137. “He was unable to get it out of his mind. Was it really possible that he had spent the past thirty years worshipping the church rather than God? Because that, in essence, was the accusation Benitez had leveled against him.”

— Robert Harris

138. “It was only later that he recognised the folly he had fallen into, a human trait he had long observed: that merely because one wishes to believe in a thing, it does not follow that it is true.”

— Robert Harris

139. “But politics is merely a process of replacing one problem with another.”

— Robert Harris

140. “Truth, in other words, was a matter of perspective.”

— Robert Harris

141. “I make no claim to be a philosopher, but this much I have observed: that whenever a thing seems at its zenith, you may be sure its destruction has already started.”

— Robert Harris

142. “I am what God made me.”

— Robert Harris

143. “Faith that cannot withstand the truth is not a faith worth holding.”

— Robert Harris

144. “To argue that to preserve our freedoms we must suspend our freedoms, that to safeguard elections we must cancel elections, that to defend ourselves from dictatorship we must appoint a dictator – what logic is this?”

— Robert Harris

145. “Looking out from his window, he felt he had been granted a glimpse of a great truth, one that had been whispering at his conscience for many years: that God was not to be pressed into service merely to suit the needs of men, however righteous they believed their cause to be; that such presumption was itself a sin. He felt both despair and a bitter vindication.”

— Robert Harris

146. “We serve an ideal; we cannot always be ideal.”

— Robert Harris

147. “Thirty years ago, the average British household contained enough food to last eight days; today the average is two days. It is no exaggeration to say that London, at any time, exists only six meals away from starvation.”

— Robert Harris