On concerns over the passage of the Patriot Act on October 25, 2001, in
2001
Context: Of course, there is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country that allowed the police to search your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your email communications; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to hold people in jail indefinitely based on what they write or think, or based on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, then the government would no doubt discover and arrest more terrorists. But that probably would not be a country in which we would want to live. And that would not be a country for which we could, in good conscience, ask our young people to fight and die. In short, that would not be America.
“Which would be worse, to live as a monster or to die as a good man?”
Source: Shutter Island
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Dennis Lehane 26
Novelist 1965Related quotes
Garfield (24 September 1881)
“A man with nothing to die for has even less for which to live.”
“I am an invisible monster, and I am incapable of loving anybody. You don't know which is worse.”
Variant: I'm an invisible monster. I'm incapable of loving anybody. You don't know which is worse.
Source: Invisible Monsters
“Socialism is a monster that will die.”
Source: Blog of the autor, 27 June 2007 http://korwin-mikke.blog.onet.pl/Socjalizm-to-po-prostu-zaraza,2,ID223835291,n
“It is strange with how little notice, good, bad, or indifferent, a man may live and die in London.”
Characters, Ch. 1 : Thoughts About People
Sketches by Boz (1836-1837)
Context: It is strange with how little notice, good, bad, or indifferent, a man may live and die in London. He awakens no sympathy in the breast of any single person; his existence is a matter of interest to no one save himself; he cannot be said to be forgotten when he dies, for no one remembered him when he was alive. There is a numerous class of people in this great metropolis who seem not to possess a single friend, and whom nobody appears to care for. Urged by imperative necessity in the first instance, they have resorted to London in search of employment, and the means of subsistence. It is hard, we know, to break the ties which bind us to our homes and friends, and harder still to efface the thousand recollections of happy days and old times, which have been slumbering in our bosoms for years, and only rush upon the mind, to bring before it associations connected with the friends we have left, the scenes we have beheld too probably for the last time, and the hopes we once cherished, but may entertain no more. These men, however, happily for themselves, have long forgotten such thoughts. Old country friends have died or emigrated; former correspondents have become lost, like themselves, in the crowd and turmoil of some busy city; and they have gradually settled down into mere passive creatures of habit and endurance.
“Fairness doesn't govern life and death. If it did, no good man would ever die young.”
Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)
“A man who does not have something for which he is willing to die is not fit to live.”