Tai-Pan

If you're a sailor, best not know how to swim. Swimming only prolongs the inevitable—if the sea wants you and your time has come.

I'm saying that some men are saints. Some are happy being meek and humble and unambitious. Some men are born content to be second-best.

Gods are like people. They believe anything if you tell them right way.

I'll thank you to remember that not so many years ago men were burned at the stake just for saying the earth went round the sun!

If you smile when you lose, then you win in life.

So easy now that Elder Sister has explained to her what all young girls in houses are taught—that with care and meticulous acting and tears of pretended pain and fear, and the final modest telltale stains cautiously placed, a girl can, if necessary, be virgin ten times for ten different men.

all the people have a right to vote, and no single man ever controls the destiny of any nation, either by divine right or by right of stupid votes of a stupid electorate.

Godrot opium, he thought. But he knew that his life was inexorably tied to opium—and that without it neither The Noble House nor the British Empire could exist.

You live by the lash and you'll die by it.

Let's compete freely. Goddam tariffs! Free trade and free seas—that's what's right!

Without trade the world will become what it was once—a hell where only the strongest arm and the heaviest lash was law. The meek will never inherit the earth. Aye, but at least they can be protected by law to live out their lives as they wish.

Only a real man has the right to stand at the pinnacle.

Fallibility in a leader is very trying. Isn’t it? They spill so much of other people’s blood.

love is like the sea, sometimes calm and sometimes stormy; it’s dangerous, beautiful, death-dealing, life-giving. But never permanent, everchanging.

There can only be one Tai-Pan.

The Scots knew that the burning of a cross was a summons to the clan, and to all the kinsmen of all kindred clans: a summons to rally to the cross for battle. And the burning cross was raised only by the chief of the clan. By ancient law, once raised, the burning cross committed the clan to defend the land unto the end of the clan.

The time be gone forever when the like of me’s to suck thy arse ’cause of a poxy title which like as not were gifted first to a king’s whore, a king’s bastard, or buyed by knife in a king’s back.

only the emperor among three hundred millions is allowed to use vermilion ink. Imagine that. If Queen Victoria said, ‘From now on, only I am allowed to use vermilion,’ as much as we love her, forty thousand Britons would instantly forswear all ink but vermilion. I would mysel’.