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"She had never been able to tolerate dishonesty, which she thought threatened the very heart of relationships between people. If you could not count on other people to mean what they said, or to do what they said they would do, then life could become utterly unpredictable. The fact that we could trust one another made it possible to undertake the simple tasks of life."
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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."
"Never sacrifice what's right for what's convenient."
"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 Alexander McCall Smith
"It was always the best way of finding out information; just go and ask a woman who keeps her eyes and ears open and who likes to talk. It always worked. It was no use asking men; they simply were not interested enough in other people and the ordinary doings of people. That is why the real historians of Africa had always been the grandmothers, who remembered the lineage and the stories that went with it."
"Men, she thought, were odd about their clothes: they liked to wear the same things until they became defeated and threadbare."
"That was what counted, she told herself: those unexpected moments of appreciation, unanticipated glimpses of beauty or kindness - any of the things that attached us to this world, that made us forget, even for a moment, its pain and its transience."
"The ordinary people of Africa tended not to have room in their hearts for hatred. They were sometimes foolish, like people anywhere, but they did not bear grudges, as Mr Mandela had shown the world."
"International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky."
"The previously unloved may find it hard to believe that they are now loved; that is such a miracle, they feel; such a miracle."
"Great feuds often need very few words to resolve them. Disputes, even between nations, between peoples, can be set to rest with simple acts of contrition and corresponding forgiveness, can so often be shown to be based on nothing much other than pride and misunderstanding, and the forgetting of the humanity of the other-and land, of course."
"We don't forget...Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, smells of places, of little things that happened to us and which come back, unexpectedly, to remind us of who we are."
"You can go through life and make new friends every year - every month practically - but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel."
"She did not think that those who were late, or the ancestors themselves, would wish punishment upon us, no matter what our transgressions. It was far more likely that there would be love, falling like rain from above, changing the hearts of the wicked; transforming them."
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