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"A man becomes trustworthy when you trust him."
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"The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble."
"At certain moments, the foot slips ; at others, the ground gives way. How many times had that conscience, furious for the right, grasped and overwhelmed him! How many times had truth, inexorable, planted her knee upon his breast! How many times, thrown to the ground by the light, had he cried to it for mercy!"
"Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices has never been more pressing-or more complicated-than it is today."
"There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty."
"Messages of instant gratification leads to a corrupt society."
"Very few people see their own actions as truly evil,... It is left to their victims to decide what is evil and what is not."
Explore more quotes by Graham Greene
"It is the storyteller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval."
"He wasn't a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people in this country, don't you, with bullets?"
"Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men."
"Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing."
"So much of a novelist's writing, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them."
"Why doesn't hatred kill desire? I would have given anything to sleep. I would have behaved like a schoolboy if I had believed in the possibility of a substitute. But there was a time when I had tried to find a substitute, and it hadn't worked."
"When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity " that was a quality God's image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination."
"In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles."
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