The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1) QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)

2 " If such things were not so dangerous one would laugh. But one recognizes the technique. Such propaganda always begins with words, but soon it proceeds to deeds. When there are no facts to support lies, facts must be made. "

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)

3 " 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. "

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)

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

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)

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

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)

6 " A person who searched rooms, brandished pistols, dangled promises of half a million franc fees for nameless services and then wrote instructions to Polish spies might reasonably be regarded with suspicion. But suspicion of what? "

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)

7 " 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 fulfilment and which his fears demand for their protection of prying eyes. He wears it like a devil mask; a device to evoke in others the emotions complementary to his own. If he is afraid, then he must be feared; if he desires, then he must be desired. It is a screen to hide his mind's nakedness. "

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)

8 " In a dying civilisation, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician but of the man with the best beside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance. Yet there remains one sort of political prestige that may still be worn with a certain pathetic dignity; it is that given to the liberal-minded leader of a party of conflicting doctrinaire extremists. His dignity is that of all doomed men: for, whether the two extremes proceed to mutual destruction or whether one of them prevails, doomed he is, either to suffer the hatred of the people or to die a martyr. "

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)

9 " 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 fulfilment and which his fears demand for their protection of prying eyes. He wears it like a devil mask; a device to evoke in others the emotions complementary to his own. If he is afraid, then he must be feared; if he desires, then he must be desired. It is a screen to hide his mind's nakedness. Only a few men, painters, have been able to see the mind through the face. Other men in their judgements reach out for the evidence of word and deed that will explain the mask before their eyes. Yet, though they understand instinctively that the mask cannot be the man behind it; they are generally shocked by a demonstration of the fact. The duplicity of others must always be shocking when one is unconscious of one's own. "

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)

10 " 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. "

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)

11 " 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. "

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)

12 " International 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. "

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)

13 " But it was useless to try to explain him in terms of Good and Evil. They were no more than baroque abstractions. Good Business and Bad Business were the elements of the new theology. Dimitrios was not evil. He was logical and consistent; as logical and consistent in the European jungle as the poison gas called Lewisite and the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town. "

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)

14 " In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest politician, but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance. "

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)

15 " We are trespassing on your hospitality "

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)

16 " As for the description, it might, like most other tabulated descriptions, have fitted tens of thousands of men. With most persons, recognition, even of an intimate, was based on the perception of vague, half-observed quantities which together formed a caricature significant more in its relation to the observer than to the observed. A short man, conscious of his lack of height, would describe a man of medium height as tall. For the ordinary business of hating and loving and getting from the cradle to the deathbed with the least possible discomfort, such caricatures were, no doubt, satisfactory. "

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)

17 " For the sceptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as a superhuman Law, it is administered with subhuman inefficiency. "

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)

18 " The duplicity of others must always be shocking when one is unconscious of one's own. "

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)

19 " Your international financier... has no political convictions. For him there is no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest. He believes in the survival of the fittest and the gospel of tooth and claw because he makes money by seeing that the weak die before they can become strong and that the law of the jungle remains the governing force in the affairs of the world. And he is all about us. Every city in the world knows him. He exists because big business, his master, needs him. International big business may conduct its operations with scraps of paper, but the ink it uses is human blood! "

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)

20 " The situation in which a person, imagining fondly that he is in charge of his own destiny, is, in fact, the sport of circumstances beyond his control, is always fascinating. "

― Eric Ambler , The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1)