“The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around.”

— Mary McCarthy

"Gandhi", p. 22. First published in Politics (Winter 1948)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

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Mary McCarthy 79

American writer 1912–1989

Alan Chalmers book What Is This Thing Called Science?

Source: What Is This Thing Called Science? (Third Edition; 1999), Chapter 3, Experiment, p. 28.

“Every lawyer of experience comes to know (more or less unconsciously) that in the great majority of cases, the precedents are none too good as bases of prediction. Somehow or other, there are plenty of precedents to go around.”

Jerome Frank (1889–1957) American jurist

Page 163.
Law and the Modern Mind (1930)

“Dean Swift's rule is as good for women as for men — never to talk above a half minute without pausing, and giving others an opportunity to strike in.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

"Parisian Morals and Manners", published in The Edinburgh Review (1843)
Smith might have been thinking of the final words of Swift's "Hints Towards an Essay on Conversation": "It is not a Fault in Company to talk much; but to continue it long, is certainly one; for, if the Majority of those who are got together be naturally silent or cautious, the Conversation will flag, unless it be often renewed by one among them, who can start new Subjects, provided he doth not dwell upon them, but leaveth Room for Answers and Replies".

“As the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn't go quite so far around it as others.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Source: In a Sunburned Country

“You see, this war came to us, not the other way around.”

Condoleezza Rice (1954) American Republican politician; U.S. Secretary of State; political scientist

Remarks at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Iraq http://usinfo.state.gov/usinfo/Archive/2005/May/16-275013.html, May 15, 2005.

“No virtue is equal to the good of others and
no vice greater than hurting others.”

Tulsidas (1532–1623) Hindu poet-saint

Tulsidas in "A Garden of Deeds: Ramacharitmanas, a Message of Human Ethics", p. 37

“For thousands of years, we Jews have been nourished and sustained by a yearning for our historic land. I, like many others, was raised with a deep conviction that the day would never come when we would have to relinquish parts of the land of our forefathers. I believed and to this day still believe in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land.”

Ehud Olmert (1945) Israeli politician, prime minister of Israel

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/24/AR2006052401420.html

“Again, it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the unlimited … and good to that of the limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult—to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult); for these reasons also, then, excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue; For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.”

Aristotle book Nicomachean Ethics

Book II, 1106b.28
Nicomachean Ethics

“I'm in love with someone good and kind and gentle, and he's seen the darkness too, but somehow we've become each other's light.”

Emma Forrest (1976) British journalist, novelist and screenwriter

Source: Your Voice in My Head

“Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Source: I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away

“The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around.”

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Mary McCarthy 79

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