Best 52 quotes of Stephen L. Carter on MyQuotes

But that is the way of the place: down our many twisting corridors, one encounters story after story, some heroic, some villainous, some true, some false, some funny, some tragic, and all of them combining to form the mystical, undefinable entity we call the school. Not exactly the building, not exactly the faculty or the students or the alumni - more than all those things but also less, a paradox, an order, a mystery, a monster, an utter joy.

Every conflict plagues the peace that follows it.

Even in 2012, if there's a black character in the movies or on television that's a professional, if we even hear about their backgrounds they're always 'up from the streets.

I find it hard to think of myself as selling books. I don't even have a Web site. I want to sit and write, not sell.

If people believe that they are marrying out of love and free choice rather than out of duty, they are more likely to decide, if love should die, that the free choice to join together is no more significant than the free choice to part, and to look for love elsewhere; those married out of duty expect less love to begin with, and what duty has brought together, duty may keep together.

In contemporary American culture, the religions are more and more treated as just passing beliefs - almost as fads - rather than as the fundaments upon which the devout build their lives.

In our sensible zeal to keep religion from dominating our politics, we have created a political and legal culture that presses the religiously faithful to be other than themselves, to act publicly, and sometimes privately as well, as though their faith does not matter to them.

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.

I think of my novels as entertainments.

I think that black fiction authors have to work very hard to avoid being typed as seeking only a black audience.

Lots of white people think black people are stupid. They are stupid themselves for thinking so, but regulation will not make them smarter.

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

One sees a trend in our political and legal cultures toward treating religious beliefs as arbitrary and unimportant, a trend supported by a rhetoric that implies that there is something wrong with religious devotion.

Richard John Neuhaus, in his well-known book The Naked Public Square, tells us that in America, the public square has become openly hostile to religion.

Rumor is rarely more interesting than fact, but it is always more readily available.

Rumors chase the dead like flies, and we follow them with our prim noses. None of us are gossips, but we love listening to those who are.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

Teasing out the way the world might look through another's eyes is what makes the creative process so fascinating and enjoyable.

There is much depressing evidence that the religious voice is required to stay out of the public square only when it is pressed in a conservative cause.

The very aspect of religions that many of their critics most fear - that the religiously devout, in the name of their faith, take positions that differ from approved state policy - is one of their strengths.

This trivializing rhetoric runs the subtle but unmistakable message: pray if you like, worship if you must, but whatever you do, do not on any account take your religion seriously.

To be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box. On the box is a label, not of my own choosing.

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; that, at least, is how I have taught myself to love my wife.

We do not credit to the ideal of religious freedom when we talk as though religious belief is something of which public-spirited adults should be ashamed.

We live today in a world in which nobody believes choices should have consequences. But may I tell you the great secret that our culture seeks to deny? You cannot escape the consequences of your choices. Time runs in only one direction.

We often ask our citizens to split their public and private selves, telling them in effect that it is fine to be religious in private, but there is something askew when those private beliefs become the basis for public action.

When you shoot someone who is fleeing, it's not self-defense. It's an execution.

You should never fall in love with your own press clippings, because it is very much the nature of the beast that the same journalists who build you up between Monday and Friday tear you down for weekend fun...My family's habit of living in the past seems to me pathological, even dangerous. If all greatness lies in the past, what is the point of the future?

Being on the inside could be an addiction

Better to wait actively than passively.

Coming from a business family, she shied away from abstractions.

He had been around politicians for a long time, and he was prepared for some outburst.

Her mother, by showing her off all through childhood, had trained into her the instinct to defeat the expectations of others.

He seemed to believe that indignation was a sufficient guardian.

He was the sort of man who only wanted to be told what he already assumed was true.

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

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

It is difficult to trust someone not raised to doctrine.

Nastiness devalues the speaker as well because the unwillingness to restrain the urge marks the speaker as less civilized, more animal-like.

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.

Never act surprised in a courtroom.

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.

Our sense of history has grown dangerously thin, and our sense of proportion with it.

People seem to remember the sacrifices they made more than what the sacrifices were for.

She had been carried away by the need to defend herself.

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

Size and elaboration were often mistaken for importance.

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

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

The only way to prove his willingness to wait would be to wait.