Munich Quotes

“This is what I have learned these past six years, as opposed to what is taught in Oxford: the power of unreason. Everyone said—by everyone I mean people like me—we all said, ‘Oh, he’s a terrible fellow, Hitler, but he’s not necessarily all bad. Look at his achievements. Put aside this awful medieval anti-Jew stuff: it will pass.’ But the point is, it won’t pass. You can’t isolate it from the rest. It’s there in the mix. And if the anti-Semitism is evil, it’s all evil. Because if they’re capable of that, they’re capable of anything.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“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.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“Power depended on being in the room when the decisions were taken.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“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.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“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.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“You were too young to fight in the last war, and I was too old. In some ways that made it worse.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“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?”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“The fact is, as the proverb says, before you can cook your rabbit you first have to catch it.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“Young man, I applaud your courage and your sincerity, but I'm afraid you need to learn a few lessons in political reality. It is simply impossible to expect the peoples of Britain and France to take up arms to deny the right of self-determination to ethnic Germans who are trapped in a foreign country they wish to leave. Against that single reality, all else fails. As for what Hitler dreams of doing in the next five years - well, we shall have to wait and see. He's been making these threats ever since Mein Kampf. My objective is clear: to avert war in the short term, and then to try to build a lasting peace for the future - one month at a time, one day at a time, if needs be. The worst act I can possibly commit for the future of mankind would be to walk away from this conference tonight.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“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.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“They weren’t such bad fellows, Hartmann thought. He had mixed with their type all his life: patriotic, conservative, clannish. For them, Hitler was like some crude gamekeeper who had mysteriously contrived to take over the running of their family estates: once installed, he had proved an unexpected success, and they had consented to tolerate his occasional bad manners and lapses into violence in return for a quiet life. Now they had discovered they couldn’t get rid of him and they looked as if they were starting to regret it.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“fissiparous”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“It had been a futile gesture, of course, but then they were trapped in an era when futile gestures were all that were available.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“If I were convinced that any nation had made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of its force, I should feel that it must be resisted. Under such a domination, life for people who believe in liberty would not be worth living. But war is a fearful thing, and we must be very clear, before we embark on it, that it is really the great issues that are at stake, and that the call to risk everything in their defence, when all the consequences are weighed, is irresistible.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“Suddenly his face twisted into a sneer. ‘Oh, I can see what you’re thinking, Hartmann. “What a vulgar fellow! A car salesman! And now he fancies himself as a second Bismarck!” But we have done something your kind never managed. We have made Germany great again.’ ‘Actually,’ said Hartmann mildly, ‘I was thinking you have egg on your chin.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“It is simply impossible to expect the peoples of Britain and France to take up arms to deny the right of self-determination to ethnic Germans who are trapped in a foreign country they wish to leave.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“He looked like a lodger who always kept himself to himself, or a nightwatchman who disappeared in the morning as soon as the day shift arrived.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“Do you honestly think we would have left something so important to the Italians?”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“The Germans felt themselves superior to the Italians. The Italians thought the Germans vulgar.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“How drab the British and the French looked in their office suits, crumpled after their long journeys, compared to the uniforms of the SS and the Italian fascists. How unvirile; how dowdy and outnumbered.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“vol-au-vents.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“Perhaps he wanted to make Monsieur Daladier feel at home by dressing as the Michelin Man?”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“Hilary term”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“astrakhan”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“the Duce.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“there were tiny swastikas on the taps. (There was no escaping the Führer’s aesthetic, thought Hartmann, not even when one took a shit.)”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“The Munich conference,” he muttered, “is a locomotive that cannot be stopped. In my opinion, it’s useless even to try.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“Is that constitutional?” “I don’t know, and frankly at this stage, what does it matter? Either this will work and everyone will be too relieved afterwards to quibble, or it won’t and they will be too busy trying on gas masks to care.”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“monarch’s”
― Robert Harris, Munich

“of her stockings, it crossed the English coast three miles”
― Robert Harris, Munich