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?
The fact is, as the proverb says, before you can cook your rabbit you first have to catch it.
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.
In the end, the only safe place to put a Trojan horse is outside your walls.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the absence of genius there is always craftsmanship.
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.
An excess of simplicity, after all, was just another form of ostentation, and pride in one’s humility a sin.
What fascinates people isn’t policy- who cares about policy? What fascinates people is always people- the detail of another person’s life.
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.
Officially it was almost spring but someone had forgotten to pass the news on to winter.
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.
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.
I have put out my books and now my house has a soul.
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.
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.