56 Quotes by Stephen L. Carter

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

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.

Size and elaboration were often mistaken for importance.

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

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.

He seemed to believe that indignation was a sufficient guardian.

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

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

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