Top 15 Terry Hayes Quotes

“Then what happened?” I asked.
“The Russian stopped calling, more important, the bills weren’t paid—I guess he either went broke or another oligarch had him killed.”
Probably the latter, I thought. That was the way most business disputes were settled in Russia.

I wandered past the stacks of drying wood, thinking about how many great skills the world had lost, how many things of value had passed without any of us even noticing. The old men with their chisels and handsaws would have once been the most highly paid members of their community and what had we put in their place? Financial engineers and young currency traders.

I went to open the front passenger’s door. It was locked and she indicated the rear seat. Apparently it was okay for a Muslim woman to lead a man to his death but not to share the front seat with him.

I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty;
I woke, and found that life was duty.

Not all death warrants are signed by judges or governors. This one was a prenup agreement.

Like the old virologist had said—sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.

"Twenty-five years ago he was executed."
It shocked me. "Executed?" I said. "For what?"
The director scanned a couple of documents and found the one he was looking for. "The usual—corruption on earth."
"I'm sorry, but what exactly does 'corruption on earth' mean?"
He laughed. "Pretty much whatever we want." Nearly all of his team found it funny too. "In this case," he continued, "it meant that he criticized the royal family and advocated its removal."

I had read about it, of course, but I had never actually seen the machinery of a totalitarian state in full flight. For anyone who values privacy and freedom it’s a terrifying thing to behold.

I had been to Jeddah on my previous trip, so I knew it well enough. As somebody once said, there was only one thing to recommend it—say you wanted to commit suicide and couldn’t quite find the courage, two days in Jeddah would do the trick.

The old Nobel Laureate in Virginia had been right when he had asked if the greatest industrial nation in history actually produced goods and machinery anymore. Millions of jobs, along with most of the country’s manufacturing base, had been exported over the decades and a great deal of the nation’s safety disappeared with them.

Heavily armed men in uniform were everywhere, but there was nothing you could call genuine security: as usual, too many guns, not enough intelligence.

A few years after the bonfire of the mob came for him and his family. Like he said, it's always the same—they start out burning books and end up burning people. Out of his parents and five kids, he was the only survivor.
"He passed through three camps in five years—all of them death camps, including Auschwitz. Because it was such a miracle he had survived, I asked him what he had learned.
"He laughed. 'Nothing you call original,' he said. Death's terrible, suffering's worse, as usual the assholes made up the majority—on both sides of the wire.
"Then he thought for a moment. There was one thing the experience had taught him. He said he'd learned that when millions of people, a whole political system, countless numbers of citizens who believed in God, said they were going to kill you—just listen to them."
Whisperer turned and looked at me. "So that's what you meant, huh? You've been listening to the Muslim fundamentalists?"
"Yes," I replied. "I've heard bombs going off in our embassies, mobs screaming for blood, mullahs issuing death decrees, so-called leaders yelling for jihad. They've been burning books, Dave—the temperature of hate in parts of the Islamic world has gone out to Pluto. And I've been listening to them."
"And you don't think we have—the people in Washington?" He said it without anger. I was at one time a leading intelligence agent and I think he genuinely wanted to know.
"Maybe in your heads. Not in your gut."

We’ve got one huge advantage—people believe what they see in databases. They’ve never learned the most important rule of cyberspace—computers don’t lie but liars can compute.

The effectiveness of any operation is in inverse proportion to the number of people used.

In the Army, as in life, sometimes you had to create a crisis in order to get people’s attention.