Alistair MacLean's Death Train Quotes

They have every good reason to fear those from the outside world. We, ironically known as the civilizados—in practically everything that matters they're a damned sight more civilised than we are—bring them so-called progress, which harms them, so-called change, which harms them, so-called civilisation, which harms them even more, and disease, which kills them.

There are no brave men and cowardly men in the world, my son. There are only brave men. To be born, to live, to die—that takes courage enough in itself, and more than enough. We are all brave men and we are all afraid, and what the world calls a brave man, he, too, is brave and afraid like all the rest of us. Only he is brave for five minutes longer.

They had come a long way, those gypsies encamped for their evening meal on the dusty greensward by the winding mountain road in Provence. ... A long journey, hot and stifling and endlessly, monotonously repetitive across the already baking plains of Central Europe or slow and difficult and exasperating and occasionally dangerous in the traversing of the great ranges of mountains that had lain in their way.

"I am sorry, Miss Lemay. This must have been a great shock to you and it's all my fault. Will you come and have a drink with me? You look as if you need one." She dabbed her cheek some more and looked at me in a manner that demolished all thoughts of instant friendship. "I wouldn't even cross the road with you," she said tonelessly. The way she said it indicated that she would willingly have gone half-way across a busy street with me and then abandoned me there. If I had been a blind man.

The intolerance of ignorance, not wanting to know – that is the last real frontier on earth.

Cruelty and hate and intolerance are the monopoly of no particular race or creed or time. They have been with us since the world began and are still with us, in every country in the world.

A terrified rat will swear to anything.

She had the best kind of courage, or maybe the worst kind, the kind that gets you into trouble.

I should have listened to Hunslett. Again I should have listened to Hunslett. And again for Hunslett's sake. But I didn't know then that Hunslett was to have time for all the sleep in the world.

Nature wanted to show mankind, an irreverent, over-venturesome mankind, just how puny and pitifully helpless a thing mankind really is

This won't look so good in my obituary, Schaffer said dolefully. There was a perceptible edge of strain under the lightly spoken words. Gave his life for his country in a ladies' lavatory in Upper Bavaria.

They'll be coming for you, Mr. Jones. They'll be coming any moment now. I hate to say this, but I must. It is my duty to warn you what will happen to you, an enemy spy. You'll be tortured, Mr. Jones—not simply everyday tortures like pulling out your teeth and toe-nails, but unspeakable tortures I can't mention with Miss Ellison here—and then you'll finish in the gas chambers. If you're still alive. Oh God, when they strip you off and strap you down on the torture table— Two seconds later Carnaby-Jones was over the sill and sliding down the nylon rope. His eyes were screwed tightly shut. Mary said, admiringly: You really are the most fearful liar ever. Schaffer keeps telling me the same thing, Smith admitted. You can't all be wrong.

The first thing I noticed was the gun in his hands, and it wasn't the sort of gun a beginner carries around with him. A big dull black German Mauser 7.63. One of those economical guns; the bullet goes clear through three people at once.

Women, I thought: if they fell over a cliff and thought there was company waiting at the bottom, they'd comb their hair on the way down.

Major Rutledge of the Buffs, Eton and Sandhurst as to intonation, millimetrically tooth-brushed as to moustache, Savile Row as to the quite dazzling sartorial perfection of his khaki drill, was so magnificently out of place in the wild beauty of the rocky, tree-lined bluffs of that winding creek that his presence there seemed inevitable.