The Man Who Knew Too Much (Xist Classics)

My life has been a life in that little room on that lonely island. Plenty of books and cigars and luxuries, plenty of knowledge and interest and information, but never a voice out of that tomb to reach the world outside. I shall probably die there." And he smiled as he looked across the vast green park to the gray horizon.

"I am the man who knows too much to know anything, or, at any rate, to do anything," said Horne Fisher. "I don't mean especially about Ireland. I mean about England. I mean about the whole way we are governed, and perhaps the only way we can be governed.

I am too tangled up with the whole thing, you see, and I was certainly never born to set it right. You look distressed, not to say shocked, and I'm not at all offended at it.

"I'm ashamed of myself," replied Fisher. "I've just been throwing cold water on the enthusiasms of a boy." "Even that explanation is hardly exhaustive," observed the criminal expert. "Damned newspaper nonsense the enthusiasms were, of course," continued Fisher, "but I ought to know that at that age illus

Nevertheless, he accepted Prime Ministers as he accepted railway trains—as part of a system which he, at least, was not the revolutionist sent on earth to destroy.

"I shall never come to the end of your interests, Fisher. I should say that what you don't know isn't worth knowing." "You are wrong," replied Fisher, with a very unusual abruptness, and even bitterness. "It's what I do know that isn't worth knowing.

"Somehow," he said, "there seems to be something rather horrid about the things you know." "There is," replied Horne Fisher. "I am not at all pleased with my small stock of knowledge and reflection.

"Well, I am a trifle tired," said Fisher, "of the Simple Life and the Strenuous Life as lived by our little set. We're all really dependent in nearly everything, and we all make a fuss about being independent in something.

They had all that forgetfulness of history that goes everywhere with the extension of education.