Source: The Space Merchants (1953), Chapter 16 (p. 186)
“It's daft, locking us up," said Nanny. "I'd have had us killed."
"That's because you're basically good," said Magrat. "The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.”
—
Terry Pratchett
,
book
Witches Abroad
Source: Witches Abroad
Last update Sept. 29, 2023.
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"That's because you're basically good," said Magrat. "…" by Terry Pratchett?
Terry Pratchett 796
English author 1948–2015Related quotes
“God save us always," I said, "from the innocent and the good.”
Pt. I, ch. 1, pg 15
Source: The Quiet American (1955)
G. K. Chesterton
(1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist
The Coloured Lands (1938)
“Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”
Section II, Chap. III.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part II
Bryan Stevenson
(1959) American lawyer, social reformer and academic
We need to talk about an injustice https://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice|
Isaac Parker
(1838–1896) American politician
September 1, 1896, reported in Homer Croy, He Hanged Them High (1952), p. 218.
Larry the Cable Guy
(1963) American stand-up comedian, actor, country music artist, voice artist
Morning Constitutions (2007)
Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
Octavio Paz
(1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature
The Clerk's Vision (1949)
Context: The world stretches out before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium. Universe of kings and presidents and jailors, of mandarins and pariahs and liberators and liberated, of judges and witnesses and the condemned: stars of the first, second, third and nth magnitudes, planets, comets, bodies errant and eccentric or routine and domesticated by the laws of gravity, the subtle laws of falling, all keeping step, all turning slowly or rapidly around a void. Where they claim the central sun lies, the solar being, the hot beam made out of every human gaze, there is nothing but a hole and less than a hole: the eye of a dead fish, the giddy cavity of the eye that falls into itself and looks at itself without seeing. There is nothing with which to fill the hollow center of the whirlwind. The springs are smashed, the foundations collapsed, the visible or invisible bonds that joined one star to another, one body to another, one man to another, are nothing but a tangle of wires and thorns, a jungle of claws and teeth that twist us and chew us and spit us out and chew us again. No one hangs himself by the rope of a physical law. The equations fall tirelessly into themselves.
And in regard to the present matter, if the present matters: I do not belong to the masters. I don't wash my hands of it, but I am not a judge, nor a witness for the prosecution, nor an executioner. I do not torture, interrogate, or suffer interrogation. I do not loudly plead for leniency, nor wish to save myself or anyone else. And for all that I don't do and for all that they do to us, I neither ask forgiveness nor forgive. Their piety is as abject as their justice. Am I innocent? I'm guilty. Am I guilty? I'm innocent. (I'm innocent when I'm guilty, guilty when I'm innocent. I'm guilty when … but that is another song. Another song? It's all the same song.) Guilty innocent, innocent guilty, the fact is I quit.