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"Every sinner must be punished in a manner befitting his sin!"
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"Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task."

"I think that's shameful, even if it's just a story, to propose an afterlife for evil... Any afterlife notion is a manipulation and a sop. It's shameful the way the unionists and the pagans both keep talking up hell for intimidation and the airy Other Land for reward."

"I worry that when you start quoting Machiavelli to justify your actions, you have ceased to be one of the good guys."

"It is incredible that this must be said, but the obvious seems to escape politicized academics, so we must state the obvious: Genocide is deliberate; it is premeditated. There is no genocide without premeditation. The murders are not unfortunate coincidences. This is why it is called "mass MURDER" and not "mass MANSLAUGHTER."

"It's easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit."

"Why does IPCA use them if they're evil? he asked, confused.'They aren't evil. They aren't even really immoral, per se. They're amoral. They don't operate on the same level that we do. For a faerie, the only thing that matters is what they want. That's their good. Anything else is superfluous. So like how they kidnap people, not a big deal-they want the person, they take him. Or killing someone. If you live forever, how much does one mortal life matter in the scheme of things? When you exist outside time, cutting off the forty years a person has left is a non-issue. They don't even notice."

"Another decent possibility my critics implicitly deny is that of work as a gift. They assume-and this is the orthodox assumption of the industrial economy-that the only help worth giving is not given at all, but sold. Love, friendship, neighbourliness, compassion, duty-what are they?"
Explore more quotes by Khaled Hosseini

"There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry."

"Hassan couldn't read a first-grade textbook but he'd read me plenty. That was a little unsettling but also sort of comfortable to have someone who always knew what you needed."

"A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it."

"To see her, amid all of it. To see that contentment and beauty were not unattainable things."

"The reputation of a girl ... is a delicate thing. Like a mynah bird in your hands. slacken your grip and away it flies."

"My books are love stories at core, really. But I am interested in manifestations of love beyond the traditional romantic notion. In fact, I seem not particularly inclined to write romantic love as a narrative motive or as an easy source of happiness for my characters."

"There is a God, there always has been. I see him here, in the eyes of the people in this [hospital] corridor of desperation. This is the real house of God, this is where those who have lost God will find Him... there is a God, there has to be, and now I will pray, I will pray that He will forgive that I have neglected Him all of these years, forgive that I have betrayed, lied, and sinned with impunity only to turn to Him now in my hour of need. I pray that He is as merciful, benevolent, and gracious as His book says He is."

"Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath."
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