Stephen L. Carter > Quotes

“Love is an activity, not a feeling…True love is not the helpless desire to possess the cherished object of one’s fervent affection; true love is the disciplined generosity we require of ourselves for the sake of another when we would rather be selfish.”
― Stephen L. Carter, The Emperor of Ocean Park

“Fidelity in a sad marriage can fairly be described as an act of faith.”
― Stephen L. Carter, The Emperor of Ocean Park

“On the opening day of law school at Yale, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.”
― Stephen L. Carter

“So many people of liberal persuasion value their own progressive opinions more than they value the people they hold those opinions about.”
― Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

“Every conflict plagues the peace that follows it.”
― Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

“Never act surprised in a courtroom.”
― Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

“Nastiness devalues the speaker as well because the unwillingness to restrain the urge marks the speaker as less civilized, more animal-like.”
― Stephen L. Carter, Civility

“Love is a gift we deliver when we would rather not.”
― Stephen L. Carter, The Emperor of Ocean Park

“Size and elaboration were often mistaken for importance.”
― Stephen L. Carter, Back Channel

“He was vain and tended to surround himself with intellectual and moral pygmies.”
― Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

“Coming from a business family, she shied away from abstractions.”
― Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

“In a crisis, time was always the enemy.”
― Stephen L. Carter, Back Channel

“Better to wait actively than passively.”
― Stephen L. Carter, Back Channel

“The only way to prove his willingness to wait would be to wait.”
― Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

“The victors always think they are righteous. But then, they always seem to start a mighty unrighteous squabbling over the spoils.”
― Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

“My parents, like so many others in the darker nation, shared the family stories of achievement but omitted the details of racial slights and discrimination, as if the telling were subject to what the historian Jonathan Holloway describes as a “psychologically enduring editor’s pencil.” So for me, writing this book has been a journey of discovery,”
― Stephen L. Carter, Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America's Most Powerful Mobster

“Jonathan had been around Washington long enough to know that no offer was exactly what it seemed.”
― Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

“Our sense of history has grown dangerously thin, and our sense of proportion with it.”
― Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

“On the first day of law school, I always remind my new students of a fact that all of us know but most of us forget: the police officers who enforce our laws go armed. Why do they do so? Because it is possible that their efforts will be resisted. They might need their guns in order to make others obey the law--or accept the punishment for their disobedience. Consequently, every time we enact a new law, we create the possibility that violent means will be required to transform the new law's command into reality. What I tell my students is a lesson I learned from the late, great legal scholar Robert Cover: Law is violence.”
― Stephen L. Carter, Civility

“He was the sort of man who only wanted to be told what he already assumed was true.”
― Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

“Negroes were constantly being arrested in the city, for crimes they committed and for crimes they did not, for rudeness or talking back or looking at a white woman, for being in the wrong neighborhood or being suspected of being in the vicinity of the wrong neighborhood. Upon conviction, many of these men were, in the words of one historian, "literally sold to the highest bidders." Convicts were much in demand as workers, and the state, not the convict, got the wage.”
― Stephen L. Carter, Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America's Most Powerful Mobster

“I bristle again. I have never liked being called clever, especially by residents of the paler nation. It never quite means the same thing as intelligent or even bright, but carries instead an intimation of a low animal cunning. Perhaps the semiotician in me overreacts in assuming that conversations are racially charged; but so many conversations are.”
― Stephen L. Carter, The Emperor of Ocean Park

“It is difficult to trust someone not raised to doctrine.”
― Stephen L. Carter, Back Channel

“She wondered why white folks, who had everything, spent so much time fighting over who got how much, while black folks, who had nothing, just sat around feeling sorry for they selves.”
― Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

“Her mother, by showing her off all through childhood, had trained into her the instinct to defeat the expectations of others.”
― Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

“She and her late husband, Leander Cross, a prominent surgeon of the darker nation, were, in my childhood, perhaps the leading host of the Gold Coast party circuit, a circuit my parents traveled often, because it was, in those days, what one did: glittering dinner at one house on the Friday, champagne brunch at another on the Sunday, caterers, cooks, even temporary butlers at the ready as the best of black Washington charged about in mad imitation of white people's foolishness.”
― Stephen L. Carter

“People seem to remember the sacrifices they made more than what the sacrifices were for.”
― Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

“He had been around politicians for a long time, and he was prepared for some outburst.”
― Stephen L. Carter, Back Channel

“She wasn't being methodological. She was being autobiographical.”
― Stephen L. Carter

“He seemed to believe that indignation was a sufficient guardian.”
― Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln