Eric Ambler Quotes

But when you have been nourishing your soul on expectation, reality is apt to be disappointing.

I tell you this, my friend; all men are cowards. They dislike a fact except when it is so wrapped up in lies and sentiments that the sharp edge of it cannot hurt them. When a man tells the truth he his, depend upon it, a dangerous man.

Good' did not triumph. 'Evil' did not triumph. The two resolved, destroyed each other and created new 'evils', new 'goods' which slew each other in their turn.

At this point doubts started to creep in. One was always reading of
young men running away to sea, or people shipping as deck-hands and
working their passages. There seemed to be no special qualifications
needed. No ropes had to be spliced. No rigging had to be climbed. All
you did was paint the anchor, chip rust off the deck plating and say
'aye, aye, sir', when addressed by an officer. It was a tough life and
you met tough men. There were weevils in the ship's biscuits and you had
little to eat but skilly. Quarrels were settled with bare fists and you
went about naked to the waist. But one of the crew always had a
concertina and there were sing-songs when the day's work was done. In
after life you wrote a book about it.

Governments had risen and fallen; men and women had worked, had starved, had made speeches, had fought, had been tortured, had died. Hope had come and gone, a fugitive in the scented bosom of illusion. Men had learned to sniff the heady dreamstuff of the soul and wait impassively while the lathes turned the guns for their destruction. And through those years, Dimitrios had lived and breathed and come to terms with his strange gods.

Reality is always so obstructive.

Yet, when these facts are seen side by side with other facts in the case, it is difficult not to become lost in superstitious awe. Their very absurdity seems to prohibit the use of the words 'chance' and 'coincidence.' For the sceptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman Law, it is administered with sub-human inefficiency.

Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through it

It was Napoleon who said that one spy in the right place was worth twenty thousand men in the field. He was speaking of his own spy, Schul-meister, a man of amazing courage, skill, and loyalty. But when the time came to reward Schulmeister for his services it was the same Napoleon who refused him the Legion of Honor for which he had been recommended, and the same Napoleon who commented that money was the only suitable reward for

1225International big business has made revolutions before now to safeguard its interests. At one time it made them ... in the name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Now, with Socialism to fight, it makes them in the name of Law and Order and Sound Finance. Assassination? If an assassination is going to be good for business, then there will be an assassination.

They don't talk the same language as us. I don't mean that they don't speak English, but that their minds are different. They're like animals, and because I hate the sight and sound of them, and because you're a Britisher, I'm telling you to get out now while the going's good.

In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner.

The important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.

International business may conduct its operations with scraps of paper, but the ink it uses is human blood.

For instance, Visser, the Dutchman, had sold German machine guns to the Chinese, spied for the Japanese and served a term of imprisonment for killing a coolie in Batavia. He was not an easy man to handle.

Ballet is merely a new rationalization of society's instinctive movement towards self-destruction. A dance of death for the Gadarene swine.

We can learn only in the expectation of life. Europe is too preoccupied with its destruction to concern itself with such things. A condemned man is interested only in himself, the passage of hours and such intimations of immortality as he can conjure from the recesses of his mind.

A man's features, the bone structure and the tissue which covers it, are the product of a biological process; but his face he creates for himself. It is a statement of his habitual emotional attitude; the attitude which his desires need for their fulfilment and which his fears demand for their protection from prying eyes. He wears it like a devil mask; a device to evoke in others the emotions complementary to his own.

I am tempted to find reason and justice in the fact that he died as violently and indecently as he lived. But that is too ingenuous a way out. It does not explain Dimitrios; it only apologizes for him. Special sorts of conditions must exist for the creation of the special sort of criminal that he typified ... all I do know is that while might is right, while chaos and anarchy masquerade as order and enlightenment, those conditions will obtain.