Top 80 Robert Ludlum Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Blessed are the flexible for they will not allow themselves to become bent out of shape!”

— Robert Ludlum

2. “Hope is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective. A lot of hope is dangerous. A spark is just fine as long as its contained.”

— Robert Ludlum

3. “You’re on your own now. You are not helpless. You will find your way.”

— Robert Ludlum

4. “The cruelest thing you can do to a person who’s living in panic is to offer him or her hope that turns out false. When the crash comes its intolerable.”

— Robert Ludlum

5. “Credo quia absurdum – I believe because it is absurd.”

— Robert Ludlum

6. “Life is extremely complicated.”

— Robert Ludlum

7. “The most precious jewels are not made of stone, but of flesh.”

— Robert Ludlum

8. “Hope, perhaps the most dangerous of all emotions and perhaps the most necessary.”

— Robert Ludlum

9. “He wasn’t smart enough to see it, said Jason Bourne. He couldn’t think geometrically.”

— Robert Ludlum

10. “There were more preposterous vicissitudes in life than a single philosophy could conjure.”

— Robert Ludlum

11. “What a man can’t remember doesn’t exist for him.”

— Robert Ludlum

12. “Sleep is a weapon!”

— Robert Ludlum

13. “It was important to keep moving. Certain struggles continued. Others had to be brought to a close. The wisdom was in deciding which.”

— Robert Ludlum

14. “I mean, we’re all trying to find out who the hell we are, aren’t we?”

— Robert Ludlum

15. “Greater economic power will be in the hands of too few.”

— Robert Ludlum

16. “The easiest thing in the world is to convince yourself that you’re right. As one grows old, it is easier still.”

— Robert Ludlum

17. “Hate and love are essentially the same in that the person who loves is as easily manipulated as a person who hates.”

— Robert Ludlum

18. “I see things and I hear things I do not understand. I’m a skilled, resourceful... vegetable!”

— Robert Ludlum

19. “Learn always but never appear to be learning.”

— Robert Ludlum

20. “Wealth is relative to the amount of time one has to enjoy it.”

— Robert Ludlum

21. “Truth is neither joyful nor sad, neither good nor bad. It is simply truth.”

— Robert Ludlum

22. “Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta... Delta is for Charlie and Charlie is for Cain.”

— Robert Ludlum

23. “The success of any trap lies in its fundamental simplicity. The reverse trap by the nature of its single complication must be swift and simpler still.”

— Robert Ludlum

24. “Well, let me tell you, gentlemen, the games of the devil are not restricted to those confined to hell. Others can play them.”

— Robert Ludlum

25. “The philosophy of a conglomerate is to buy as far and as wide as possible and diversify its markets. It both uses and refutes the Malthusian.”

— Robert Ludlum

26. “I try as best I can to enter the realm of nuances of human behavior.”

— Robert Ludlum

27. “Bourne concentrated on rest and mobility. From somewhere in his forgotten past he understood that recovery depended upon both and he applied rigid discipline to both.”

— Robert Ludlum

28. “Characterization is integral to the theatrical experience.”

— Robert Ludlum

29. “You appear to be a mass of contradictions; there’s a subsurface violence almost always in control, but very much alive.”

— Robert Ludlum

30. “It’s called obfuscation in the interest of deniability. You might say it’s our lingua franca.”

— Robert Ludlum

31. “Sundown. The distressed sloop, its mainmast shattered by lightning, its sails ripped by the winds of the open sea, drifted into the small, quiet beach of a private island in the Lesser Antilles.”

— Robert Ludlum

32. “A man’s weaknesses may intrude on his faith but they do not diminish it.”

— Robert Ludlum

33. “Visions of one powerful scene after another parade across his inner screen, each exploding with drama and meaning.”

— Robert Ludlum

34. “It was the calm of the observer, the uninvolved observer, separated from the events, knowing of them but not essentially involved.”

— Robert Ludlum

35. “Operations, room five, in twenty minutes.”

— Robert Ludlum

36. “The premise that financial giants stood passively by while a band of psychopaths shaped post-Weimar Germany was ludicrous.”

— Robert Ludlum

37. “Alex, drunk or sober, made no distinction between the hours of day and night, nor did the operations he knew so well, for there was no night and day where his work was concerned. There was only the flat light of fluorescent tubes in offices that never closed.”

— Robert Ludlum

38. “Because the physical conduits that permit and transmit those memories have been altered. Physically rearranged to the point where they no longer function as they once did. For all intents and purposes, they’ve been destroyed.”

— Robert Ludlum

39. “There’ll come a moment when you think you can make it, and you’ll try.”

— Robert Ludlum

40. “There’s a rift in this country between the people and its leaders. There is corruption at the highest levels of government; it goes beyond mere power politics. The Constitution has been seriously assaulted, our way of life threatened.”

— Robert Ludlum

41. “You know, Mr. Webb, you have two commands you use with irritating frequency. ‘Move’ and ‘Let’s go.”

— Robert Ludlum

42. “Perhaps conscience did not always produce cowards. Sometimes it made a man feel better about himself.”

— Robert Ludlum

43. “Did not the Christians incessantly talk about walking into the arms of Christ for the causes of Christ, calling for wars in his name?”

— Robert Ludlum

44. “Never trust a leader who proclaims himself a leader before anyone else does.”

— Robert Ludlum

45. “Men and women walked casually about as they did on the main floor, every now and then stopping one another, exchanging pleasantries or scraps of relevantly irrelevant information. Gossip.”

— Robert Ludlum

46. “One balks, then agrees, then balks again only to agree again; that is the way one learns things.”

— Robert Ludlum

47. “When the old men kill themselves, the cities are dying.”

— Robert Ludlum

48. “It’s an insoluble dilemma, really. Presidents change, different men with different temperaments and appetites sit in the Oval Office. However, a long-range intelligence strategy doesn’t change, not one like this. Yet an offhand remark over a glass of whiskey in a postpresidential conversation, or an egotistical phrase in a memoir, can blow that same strategy right to hell. There isn’t a day that we don’t worry about those men who have survived the White House.”

— Robert Ludlum

49. “It’s a geometric puzzle; it can happen in any combination of ways. Physically or psychologically – or a little of both. It can be permanent or temporary, all or part. No rules!”

— Robert Ludlum

50. “For so many, death is a liberation from intolerable human conditions.”

— Robert Ludlum