Mike

“I looked at the slum children dancing like a movie chorus and capering like temple monkeys. I was teaching some of those children to speak, read, and write English. Already, with just the little they'd learned in three months, a few of them were winning work from foreign tourists. Were those children, I wondered, the mice that fed from my hand? Would their trusting innocence be seized by a fate that wouldn't and couldn't have been theirs without me, without my intervention in their lives? What wounds and torments awaited Tariq simply because I'd befriended and taught him?”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“You know,' she said slowly, 'I like you, Lin.'
She stared that green fire into me. I felt myself reddening slightly, not from embarrassment, but from shame, that she'd said so easily the very words, I like you, that I wouldn't let myself say to her.
'You do?' I asked, trying to make the question sound more casual than it was. I watched her lips close in a thin smile.
'Yes. You're a good listener. That's dangerous, because it's so hard to resist. Being listened to - really listened to - is the second-best thing in the world.'
'What's the first best thing?'
'Everybody knows that. The best thing in the world is power.'
'Oh, is it?' I asked, laughing. 'What about sex?'
'No. Apart from biology, sex is all about power.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“Khaderbhai once said that every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret. It mightn't be true of everyone, but it was true enough for me. The little good that I've done in the world has always dragged behind it a shadow of dark sinpiraction. What I do know now, and didn't know then is that , in the long run, motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad. When all the guilt and shame for the bad we've done have run their course, it's the good we did that can save us. But then, when salvation speaks, the secrets we kept, and the motives we concealed, creep from their shadows. They cling to us, those dark motives for our good deeds. Redemption's climb is steepest if the good we did is soiled with secret shame.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“If anything they did the opposite by inhibiting the development of expertise needed to know when to confirm to prescriptive procedures and when to go beyond them. In this, procedural rules seek to transfer judgement by codifying it. This may work some of the time, but it cannot work all of the time because judgement is not procedural. There can be no substitute for judgement, and as well no escaping that the expert has it but the novice does not.”
― Steven G. Vick