Chris Starr

“No way. You won’t catch Notley working weekends. Calls it the American disease, working all the hours God sends you.”
― Richard K. Morgan, Market Forces: A Novel

“When I lifted up the Bible as my ultimate authority, I made my leather-bound, gold-engraved Bible into a paper calf.”
― Philip Gulley, If Grace Is True: Why God Will Save Every Person

“But he hadn’t done something wrong, I suggested. He had saved innocent lives and helped defeat those who would bring society down. “It was still against the law!” he shouted. “Don’t you see? If the law means anything then I couldn’t be above it. Not just because I was a police officer or because my breaking it had resulted in some lives being saved. That’s not the point. Torture was illegal. I’d broken the law. Can’t you see any of this?” He shook his the chair, rattling the chains attaching his handcuffs to the floor. “It’s even more important to prosecute police who’ve broken the law than it is to prosecute anybody else, because otherwise nobody trusts the police.” I pointed out that the forceful questioning of suspects was now entirely if unfortunately legal, even if it hadn’t been then. “‘Forceful questioning.’ You mean torture.”
― Iain Banks, Transition

“The thing is,” he said, “maybe in the same situation, even knowing what I know now, I’d still do the same thing. I’d still tear that Christian bastard’s nails out, get him to talk, find out where the bomb was, hope that the plods got the right street, the right end of it, the right fucking city.” He looked at me with what might have been defiance or even a sort of pleading. “But I’d still insist that I was charged and prosecuted.” He shook his head again. “Don’t you see? You can’t have a state where torture is legal, not for anything. You start saying it’s only for the most serious cases, but that never lasts. It should always be illegal, for everybody, for everything. You might not stop it. Laws against murder don’t stop all murders, do they? But you make sure people don’t even think about it unless it’s a desperate situation, something immediate. And you have to make the torturer pay. In full. There has to be that disincentive, or they’ll all be at it.”
― Iain Banks, Transition