Top 80 Robert Ludlum Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I have always preferred conflict of individuals over the battle of extreme ideologies.”

— Robert Ludlum

52. “The mind plays tricks. It rejects things until it thinks – or something tells it – that the remembering can be handled.”

— Robert Ludlum

53. “I get annoyed when a self-indulgent writer just shows off what he knows but doesn’t really tell a story. To me storytelling is first a craft. Then if you’re lucky, it becomes an art form. But first, it’s got to be a craft... You’ve got to have a beginning, middle and end. And I have sort of applied the theatrical principles to writing. Throw the story in the air and see what’s going to happen.”

— Robert Ludlum

54. “We’re a couple of ciphers who got pushed around. We don’t know what happened; just that we don’t like it.”

— Robert Ludlum

55. “A theater person should know what holds an audience and what does not.”

— Robert Ludlum

56. “A corruption of intentions.”

— Robert Ludlum

57. “Strangers should meet in unfamiliar areas. It’s comforting.”

— Robert Ludlum

58. “Reputations were made quickly over the green felt tables – with the roll of the dice or a turn of a card.”

— Robert Ludlum

59. “Nothing is so convincing as someone who’s a bewildered injured party and lets everybody know it.”

— Robert Ludlum

60. “There is nothing in a crowded street more noticeable than a man running – unless it is a woman.”

— Robert Ludlum

61. “You appear to be a mass of contradictions,” Dr Washburn said. “There’s a subsurface violence almost always in control, but very much alive. There’s also a pensiveness that seems painful for you, yet you rarely give vent to the anger that pain must provoke.”

— Robert Ludlum

62. “Indiscriminate use among unintelligent leads to chaos.”

— Robert Ludlum

63. “And then the earth, the world, the planet, the galaxy, and the entire solar system went crazy.”

— Robert Ludlum

64. “Wealth is relative to the amount of time one has to enjoy it. I wouldn’t have five minutes.”

— Robert Ludlum

65. “The slightest alteration can cause dramatic changes. That’s what happened to you. The damage was physical. It’s as though blocks were rearranged, the physical structure no longer what it was.”

— Robert Ludlum

66. “He may be a scholar, but he’s first a man who believes – with certain justification – that he was betrayed by his government.”

— Robert Ludlum

67. “They never listened until it was too late, and then only with stern forbearance and strong reminders of what might have been – had things been as they were perceived to be, which they were not.”

— Robert Ludlum

68. “That’s not a man who’s either afraid or guilty.”

— Robert Ludlum

69. “Better the devil you can live with than one you don’t know.”

— Robert Ludlum

70. “The physical and the psychological. They were related, interwoven – two strands of experience, or stimulae, that became knotted.”

— Robert Ludlum

71. “It’s not the meek who are inheriting the earth, Jason, it’s the corruptors.”

— Robert Ludlum

72. “I fought... I fought and I fought... until I... couldn’t remember any more.”

— Robert Ludlum

73. “There was too little space for their own – and they guarded their own as all Chinese had done from the earliest dynasties.”

— Robert Ludlum

74. “Events shaped men, perhaps, but they did not remove alternatives of choice.”

— Robert Ludlum

75. “Whenever you’re in a stress situation yourself – and there’s time, of course – do exactly as you would do when you project yourself into one you’re observing. Let your mind fall free, let whatever thoughts and images that surface come cleanly. Try not to exercise any mental discipline. Be a sponge; concentrate on everything and nothing. Specifics may come to you, certain repressed conduits electrically prodded into functioning.”

— Robert Ludlum

76. “If there was such a life and he could accept it without the terrible labyrinth from which he could find no escape. But it was more than that. In a manmade labyrinth one kept moving, running, careening off walls, the contact itself a form of progress, if only blind. His personal labyrinth had no walls, no defined corridors through which to race.”

— Robert Ludlum

77. “I look at an objective,’ answered Vasili, ’and I do my best to analyse the problems inherent in reaching it.”

— Robert Ludlum

78. “Oh, God, she loathed them all! Mindless, stupid men. Playing with the lives of other men, knowing so little, thinking they knew so much. They had not listened! They never listened until it was too late, and then only with stern forbearance and strong reminders of what might have been – had things been as they were perceived to be, which they were not. The corruption came from blindness, the lies from obstinacy and embarrassment. Do not embarrass the powerful; the napalm said it all.”

— Robert Ludlum

79. “The information in the folder did not constitute proof, only data that could or could not bolster the conjectures he had made.”

— Robert Ludlum

80. “He was a relieved man; he was an angry man.”

— Robert Ludlum

81. “Call it the courage of an insignificant goat who has survived.”

— Robert Ludlum

82. “And I’d prefer you function the very best you can at that appointment. My interests are extremely selfish, no remissions permitted.”

— Robert Ludlum

83. “Of course not. A goat does not willingly enter the wolf’s cave.” “Goats are surefooted; they’ve got an accurate sense of smell.” “And they are cautious, mein Herr. Because the wolf is faster, infinitely more aggressive. There would be only one chase. The goat’s last.”

— Robert Ludlum