Famous Quotes

"I hate politics. I like to write about it, but to get involved in it, to try and make a lot of ignorant people do what you want them to do, waste of time. Go and write a book. It's more important and it'll last longer."

Wilbur Smith on Politics

More quotes about Politics

• "Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future."

  John F. Kennedy on Politics

• "Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress but I repeat myself."

  Mark Twain on Politics

• "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."

  Plato on Politics

• "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."

  Milton Friedman on Politics

• "It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."

  Joseph Stalin on Politics

More quotes by Wilbur Smith

• "The first novel I wrote was a monster - clocking in at 180,000 words - but it died a death, a death it deserved. It was called 'The Gods First Make Mad.' It was a good title, but it was the only good thing about the book. I didn't let that put me off."

• "I have been blessed in many ways, and one of those is to have been born in Africa, for me a great treasure house of stories. I have been researching it since my infancy reading about it, talking to men and women who have spent their lives in this land, living it as I have and loving it as I do. I write almost entirely from my own experience."

• "I wanted to be a great white hunter, a prospector for gold, or a slave trader. But then, when I was eight, my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers, beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books."

• "I'm not a prophet I can only use historical reality to come to a view of the future, and my view is that Africa will return to being African and not European. The advent of colonialism was foreign to the country itself, but it will return to what it was before the Europeans arrived."

• "I think money is essential to happiness and right now I wouldn't want to be anyone other than Wilbur Smith - I've had a fantastic life, rewarded far more heavily than I deserve. Maybe I'd like to be J. K. Rowling, but I'll settle for second best."