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.
Any man who is truly worthy must consider himself unworthy.
Power depended on being in the room when the decisions were taken.
All civilisations consider themselves invulnerable; history warns us that none is.
Truth was like any other material necessary for the making of war: it had to be beaten and bent and cut into the required shape.
What starts as gratitude quickly becomes dependency and ends as entitlement.
Anyone found not enjoying themselves will be shot.
No one who ever follows their conscience ever does wrong. The consequences may not turn out as we intended; it may prove that we made a mistake. But that is not the same as being wrong.
You were too young to fight in the last war, and I was too old. In some ways that made it worse.