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"In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles."
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"In the legal respect, after the execution of the supposed incendiaries, the other half of Moscow burned down."
"In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain."
"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."
"History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies."
"Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living. that's the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn't matter if it's a hundred years or only a few weeks. It's all filed away, fresh as the day it went under the covers."
"One would have to have completely forgotten the history of science so as to not remember that the desire to know nature has had the most constant and the happiest influence on the development of mathematics."
"The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men."
Explore more quotes by Graham Greene
"It is the storyteller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval."
"He wasn't a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people in this country, don't you, with bullets?"
"Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men."
"Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing."
"So much of a novelist's writing, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them."
"Why doesn't hatred kill desire? I would have given anything to sleep. I would have behaved like a schoolboy if I had believed in the possibility of a substitute. But there was a time when I had tried to find a substitute, and it hadn't worked."
"He began to realize what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power."
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