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"Being a person is respect, because you're not a cat or a dog or a bunch of tulips, you're a human person and humanness isn't like something there can be different amounts of, it's maxed out from the start, total respect every time - kill one, kill a trainload, you're dissing the transcendental is all."
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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."
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"It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them."


"We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else."


"If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation."


"Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me-I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you."


"James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized."


"Theater in New York is nearer to the street. In London, you have to go deep into the building, usually, to reach the place where theater happens. On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk, and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night."
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