Quotes from Fatherland

Robert Harris ·  380 pages

Rating: (26.2K votes)


“A police state is a country run by criminals”
― Robert Harris, quote from Fatherland


“Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called ‘heightened interrogation’. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated the presence of a doctor.”
― Robert Harris, quote from Fatherland


“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.”
― Robert Harris, quote from Fatherland


“Against the alchemy of two naked bodies in a bed in the darkness, and against all the complex longings and attachments and commitments such intimacy might arouse, he had nothing with which to fight.”
― Robert Harris, quote from Fatherland


“A permanent state of war on the Eastern front will help to form a sound race of men,’ the Führer had once said, ‘and will prevent us relapsing into the softness of a Europe thrown back upon itself.’ But”
― Robert Harris, quote from Fatherland



“How odd it is, thought March afterwards, to live your life in ignorance of the past, of your world, yourself. Yet how easy to do it! You went along from day to day, down paths other people had prepared for you, never raising your head - enfolded in their logic, from swaddling clothes to shroud. It was a kind of fear. Well, goodbye to that. And good to leave it behind - whatever happened now. - 214”
― Robert Harris, quote from Fatherland


“The avenue was designed by Reichsminister Albert Speer and completed in 1957. It is one hundred and twenty-three meters wide and five-point-six kilometers in length. It is both wider, and two and a half times longer, than the Chaps Elysees in Paris.

Higher, longer, bigger, wider, more expensive...even in victory, thought March, Germany has a parvenu's inferiority complex. Nothing stands on its own. Everything has to be compared with what the foreigners have....”
― Robert Harris, quote from Fatherland


“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”
― Robert Harris, quote from Fatherland


About the author

Robert Harris
Born place: in Nottingham, England, , The United Kingdom
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Popular quotes

“In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.”
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