19 Quotes by Walter Van Tilburg Clark

She wasn’t given to thinking very far, but she did a lot of intelligent feeling.

None of them were even married, and the kind of women they got a chance to know weren’t likely to be changed by what a rustler would do to them.

Nothing imaginative ever happens to five people at once, because each is up to only one-fifth of his personal intelligence and perception. A crowd is never equal to the intelligence of any one of its members.

It followed that the powers of light and darkness were not wholly and always opposed to one another.

Yet the great “Why?” always at the center of the little “whats” and “hows” that makes religions into mythologies is often stronger in dead temples than in living.

I failed, he said, I got talking my ideas. It's my greatest failing.

True law, the code of justice, the essence of our sensations of right and wrong, is the conscience of society. It has taken thousands of years to develop, and it is the greatest, the most distinguishing quality which has developed with mankind ... If we can touch God at all, where do we touch him save in the conscience? And what is the conscience of any man save his little fragment of the conscience of all men in all time?

Then our crime's worse than a murderer's. His act puts him outside the law, but keeps the law intact. Ours would weaken the law.

We desire justice, and justice has never been obtained in haste and strong feeling.