19 Quotes by Walter Van Tilburg Clark

He proved that it was equally true if the disregard was by a ruler or by a people. "It spreads like a disease," he said. "And it's infinitely more deadly when the law is disregarded by men pretending to act for justice than when it's simply inefficient, or even when its elected administrator's are crooked.

a gentle, permanent reality that was in him like his bones or his heart, that made him seem like an everlasting part of things.

It is possible to insult Americans?”“They are automatically insulted and enraged,” said the young composer. “They form splenetic organizations by the hundreds, and write letters to periodicals and congressmen. They gather in mobs and pay no attention. They hang people without trial and shoot citizens down with machine guns out of passing cars. They will despise you because you do not eat the same things they eat for breakfast. They even apply indifference.

He had lost the bright gods, and he had not been accepted by the dark. He was in a no soul’s land, and in its isolation his own soul was withdrawn, small and heavy as a stone within him, and about his evil deed. No wonder it could not take wing and make the heralding music. That was the whole of reality now, the little stone inside, and outside the cold, dark ravine and the inescapable watcher.

Most men are more afraid of being thought cowards than of anything else, and a lot more afraid of being thought physical cowards than moral ones.

That hatred of the railroad was Winder’s only original notion, and when he got mad that always came in some way. Everything else was what he’d heard somebody, or most everybody, say, only he always got angry enough to make it sound like a conviction.

He proved that it was equally true if the disregard was by a ruler or by a people. “It spreads like a disease,” he said. “And it’s infinitely more deadly when the law is disregarded by men pretending to act for justice than when it’s simply inefficient, or even when its elected administrator’s are crooked.

Places, like people, have their beginnings and have also their endings.

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?