Quotes from Stephen L. Carter

More than 20 years on, sustained competition, informed customers and the rapid growth of new technology provide the necessary environment for substantial deregulation.

In real life there are indeed black people who have been in the middle class for generations, but in entertainment it's as if they don't exist.

She wondered why white folks, who had everything, spent so much time fighting over who got how much, while black folks, who had nothing, just sat around feeling sorry for they selves.

It is difficult to trust someone not raised to doctrine.

They loved the sound of their own voices. No decision would be reached anytime soon.

In spite of his Cold War credentials, Kennedy still believed in the power of words.

It was all so beautiful, so quiet, and yet with such a full and thrilling sweep from time into eternity that my sorrow was stilled and I could wail no monody. My desolate hour must wait.

She wasn't being methodological. She was being autobiographical.

The kind of people we have in Washington only trust what they think they own.

I do not know where Romeo comes from or even his real name. He was once on the street, as he puts it-meaning he dealt drugs-but managed to find Jesus without the inconvenience of first going to prison.

To Tom, the march of technology was equivalent to the march of civilization.

In 1950 there would be 31,707 male lawers in New York State. There would be 1,275 female lawyers in New York State. There would be 19 Negro women lawyers in New York State. Put otherwise, black women constituted about 6 10,000ths (0.06%) of all the state's layers. A proportion so small that it is less a minority than a rounding error.

I pass flurries of undergrads who, despite their proudly proclaimed diversity, look more and more the same.

She and her late husband, Leander Cross, a prominent surgeon of the darker nation, were, in my childhood, perhaps the leading host of the Gold Coast party circuit, a circuit my parents traveled often, because it was, in those days, what one did: glittering dinner at one house on the Friday, champagne brunch at another on the Sunday, caterers, cooks, even temporary butlers at the ready as the best of black Washington charged about in mad imitation of white people's foolishness.

Being on the inside could be an addiction

Love is an activity, not a feeling…True love is not the helpless desire to possess the cherished object of one's fervent affection; true love is the disciplined generosity we require of ourselves for the sake of another when we would rather be selfish.

Fidelity in a sad marriage can fairly be described as an act of faith.

On the opening day of law school at Yale, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.

So many people of liberal persuasion value their own progressive opinions more than they value the people they hold those opinions about.

Every conflict plagues the peace that follows it.

Never act surprised in a courtroom.

Love is a gift we deliver when we would rather not.

He was vain and tended to surround himself with intellectual and moral pygmies.

Negroes were constantly being arrested in the city, for crimes they committed and for crimes they did not, for rudeness or talking back or looking at a white woman, for being in the wrong neighborhood or being suspected of being in the vicinity of the wrong neighborhood. Upon conviction, many of these men were, in the words of one historian, "literally sold to the highest bidders." Convicts were much in demand as workers, and the state, not the convict, got the wage.