History is too important to be left to the historians.
The natural impulse of men is to follow and whoever has the strongest sense of purpose will always dominate.
A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written.
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.
What is leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason.
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.
You can’t ever win the war on crime, or the war on terror. You can’t repeal human nature.
Working 14 hours a day until you’re 55 and missing your kids growing up is not what I would consider a recipe for happiness.
The financial world is at the cutting edge of high technology.
I write as well as I can. I’m a journalist at heart, so it’s the story that matters.
By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.
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.
But only a fool sails into combat with nature.
But clever people all make one mistake. They all think everyone else is stupid. And everyone isn’t stupid. They just take a bit more time, that’s all.
Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.
You can always spot a fool, for he is a man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election.
I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.
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.
What do you do,’ he said, ‘if you devote your life to discovering criminals, and it gradually occurs to you that the real criminals are the people you work for? What do you do when everyone tells you not to worry, you can’t do anything about it, it was a long time ago?’ She was looking at him in a different way. ‘I suppose you go crazy.’ ‘Or worse. Sane.
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.