Quotes About Morality

He allowed himself to think that in certain circumstances he would rob his bank but, as these circumstances never arose, his life rolled out evenly—an adventureless tale.

Tell me, for example, would you deflower a virgin?—Excuse me, Stephen said politely, is that not the ambition of most young gentlemen?

She ate the apple and gave it also to Adam who had not the moral courage to resist her.

I believe you're a good fellow but you have yet to learn the dignity of altruism and the responsibility of the human individual.

Turks, it's in the dogma. Because if they didn't believe they'd go straight to heaven when they die they'd try to live better — at least, so I think.

If a cavalcade of organized killing has nothing to teach us, I don't know what does.

It's a great burden, being one of the good guys.

Saint Augustine once admonished that we should never use the truth to injure. I believe there are dark and uncertain moments in our lives when it's not wrong for each of us to feel that he wrote those words especially for us.

As with all megalomaniacs, he had no handles. He was the type of man the Spanish call sin dios, sin verguenza, without God or shame.

Deviants and monsters ran the camps where families were sent up the chimney or turned into bars of soap, but they would have been powerless without the clerks who sat anonymously behind typewriters and gave them bureaucratic legitimacy.

James Lee Burke

Wicked men do not go away of their own accord.

James Lee Burke

We're living in weird times, Streak. I bet forty percent of the country wouldn't mind firing up the ovens as long as the smokestacks are blowing downwind.

James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke

In Montana I knew a twenty-one-year-old kid who killed two people before he got to prison, then killed or helped kill five more during a riot. He had to be awakened from a sound sleep the afternoon of his execution. The

Two kinds of cops eat their gun: the corrupt ones and the ones who let the dead lay claim upon the quick.

At heart they were secular Calvinists and believed their fellow man was born in a degraded state; consequently, they oversaw atrocities with equanimity and substituted pragmatism for compassion and slept the sleep of the dead.

Do you know why we drink? So we can do the things our conscience won't let us do when we're sober." If you're a souse, try to refute a statement like that.

Besides, isn't it better to let evil die inside its own flame?

I was not simply tired of the world's iniquity. I was tired of greed in particular and the ostentatious display of wealth that characterizes our times, and the justifications for despoiling the earth and injuring our fellow man.

James Lee Burke

Straight shooters always win