“Once you have the gallows, you’ll find new reasons to hang people from it.”

— Orson Scott Card

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Heartfire (1998), Chapter 7.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Orson Scott Card 586

American science fiction novelist 1951

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

You will find the distance that separates you from them by joining them.
Voces (1943)

“It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

“If you talk to gangsters long enough, you’ll find out they’re just as bad as respectable people.”

Murray Kempton (1917–1997) American journalist

“Love hangs herself with the bedsheets in her cell
Threw myself on fires for you
Ten good reasons to stay alive
Ten good reasons that I can't find”

Courtney Love (1964) American punk singer-songwriter, musician, actress, and artist

"Reasons to be Beautiful"
Song lyrics, Celebrity Skin (1998)

“As long as you can find yourself, you’ll never starve.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

“Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.”

Alice Munro book Runaway

Source: Runaway (2004)
Context: This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don't think about it at all.
The thing that was your bright treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.
This is what happens.
Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.

“And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations - as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world - we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

Hannah Arendt's "judgement" of Eichmann, in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).

“If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.”

Jonathan Haidt (1963) American psychologist

Source: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012)

“Madam, I have come from a country where people are hanged if they talk.”

Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) Swiss mathematician

In Berlin, to the Queen Mother of Prussia, on his lack of conversation in his meeting with her, on his return from Russia; as quoted in Science in Russian Culture : A History to 1860 (1963) Alexander Vucinich
Variant: Madame... I have come from a country where one can be hanged for what one says.

“Don’t take the high ground and assume you already know what you’ll do. The truth is, when it comes to someone you love, you’ll find there isn’t anything you won’t do.”

Richelle Mead book The Fiery Heart

Source: The Fiery Heart

“Once you have the gallows, you’ll find new reasons to hang people from it.”

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Orson Scott Card 586

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