214 quotes found
“The justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil.”
“Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code ...”
“Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don’t.”
“Incredulity and indifference were her only reaction: incredulity, because she could not conceive of what would bring human beings to such a state —indifference, because she could not regard those w...”
“They said you were hard and cold and unfeeling.”“But it’s true...I am, in the sense they mean—only have they ever told you in just what sense they mean it?""What did they mean about you?”“Whenever ...”
“Whenever anyone accuses some person of being ‘unfeeling,’ he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not d...”
“...there’s nothing of any importance in life—except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It’s the only measure of human value.”
“No, justice has not ceased to exist. How could it? It is possible for men to abandon their sight of it, and then it is justice that destroys them. But it is not possible for justice to go out of ex...”
“There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.”
“No action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice.”
“The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around?”“Darling, what do you mean?”“There wasn’t a person there ...”
“Thought—he told himself quietly—is a weapon one uses in order to act. No action was possible. Thought is the tool by which one makes a choice. No choice was left to him. Thought sets one’s purpose ...”
“You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-den...”
“...there was no guilt in his face, no doubt, nothing but the calm of an inviolate self-confidence.”
“The only thing that counts in life is solid, material assets. It's no time for theories when everything is falling to pieces around us.”
“As she looked at him, her dark gray eyes went slowly from astonishment to stillness, then to a strange expression that resembled a look of weariness, except that it seemed to reflect much more than...”
“...she stood beside him, sagging in his arms, abandoning herself to anything he wished, in open acknowledgment of his power to reduce her to helplessness by the pleasure he had the power to give her.”
“He saw the article...which was not an expression of ideas, but a bucket of slime emptied in public—an article that did not contain a single fact, not even an invented one, but poured a stream of sn...”
“...he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.”
“He saw for the first time that he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.”
