Stephen L. Carter Quotes & Sayings

He had been around politicians for a long time, and he was prepared for some outburst. — Stephen L. Carter

You should never fall in love with your own press clippings, because it is very much the nature of the beast that the same journalists who build you up between Monday and Friday tear you down for weekend fun ... My family's habit of living in the past seems to me pathological, even dangerous. If all greatness lies in the past, what is the point of the future? — Stephen L. Carter

Our sense of history has grown dangerously thin, and our sense of proportion with it. — Stephen L. Carter

Depression is seductive: it offends and teases, frightens you and draws you in, tempting you with its promise of sweet oblivion, then overwhelming you with a nearly sexual power, squirming past your defenses, dissolving your will, invading the tired spirit so utterly that it becomes difficult to recall that you ever lived without it ... or to imagine that you might live that way again. With all the guile of Satan himself, depression persuades you that its invasion was all your own idea, that you wanted it all along. It fogs the part of the brain that reasons, that knows right from wrong. It captures you with its warm, guilty, hateful pleasures, and, worst of all, it becomes familiar. All at once, you find yourself in thrall to the very thing that most terrifies you. Your work slides, your friendships slide, your marriage slides, but you scarcely notice: to be depressed is to be half in love with disaster. — Stephen L. Carter

One sees a trend in our political and legal cultures toward treating religious beliefs as arbitrary and unimportant, a trend supported by a rhetoric that implies that there is something wrong with religious devotion. — Stephen L. Carter

He seemed to believe that indignation was a sufficient guardian. — Stephen L. Carter

Teasing out the way the world might look through another's eyes is what makes the creative process so fascinating and enjoyable. — Stephen L. Carter

We do not credit to the ideal of religious freedom when we talk as though religious belief is something of which public-spirited adults should be ashamed. — Stephen L. Carter

Rumor is rarely more interesting than fact, but it is always more readily available. — Stephen L. Carter

But that is the way of the place: down our many twisting corridors, one encounters story after story, some heroic, some villainous, some true, some false, some funny, some tragic, and all of them combining to form the mystical, undefinable entity we call the school . Not exactly the building, not exactly the faculty or the students or the alumni more than all those things but also less, a paradox, an order, a mystery, a monster, an utter joy. — Stephen L. Carter

Coming from a business family, she shied away from abstractions. — Stephen L. Carter

Fidelity in a sad marriage can fairly be described as an act of faith. — Stephen L. Carter

He was the sort of man who only wanted to be told what he already assumed was true. — Stephen L. Carter

The kind of people we have in Washington only trust what they think they own. — Stephen L. Carter

In contemporary American culture, the religions are more and more treated as just passing beliefs - almost as fads - rather than as the fundaments upon which the devout build their lives. — Stephen L. Carter

We live today in a world in which nobody believes choices should have consequences. But may I tell you the great secret that our culture seeks to deny? You cannot escape the consequences of your choices. Time runs in only one direction. — Stephen L. Carter

I pass flurries of undergrads who, despite their proudly proclaimed diversity, look more and more the same. — Stephen L. Carter

The very aspect of religions that many of their critics most fear - that the religiously devout, in the name of their faith, take positions that differ from approved state policy - is one of their strengths. — Stephen L. Carter

Her mother, by showing her off all through childhood, had trained into her the instinct to defeat the expectations of others. — Stephen L. Carter

True love is not the helpless desire to possess the cherished object of one's fervent affection; true love is the disciplined generosity we require of ourselves for the sake of another when we would rather be selfish; that, at least, is how I have taught myself to love my wife. — Stephen L. Carter

Better to wait actively than passively. — Stephen L. Carter

In spite of his Cold War credentials, Kennedy still believed in the power of words. — Stephen L. Carter

This trivializing rhetoric runs the subtle but unmistakable message: pray if you like, worship if you must, but whatever you do, do not on any account take your religion seriously. — Stephen L. Carter

They loved the sound of their own voices. No decision would be reached anytime soon. — Stephen L. Carter

Lots of white people think black people are stupid. They are stupid themselves for thinking so, but regulation will not make them smarter. — Stephen L. Carter

This is what conservatives have spawned with their welfare cuts and their indifference to the plight of those not like themselves, say my colleagues at the university. This is what liberals have spawned with their fostering of the victim mentality and their indifference to the traditional values of hard work and family, my father used to tell his cheering audiences. In my sour moments, it strikes me that both sides seem much more interested in winning the argument than in alleviating these women's suffering. — Stephen L. Carter

Richard John Neuhaus, in his well-known book The Naked Public Square, tells us that in America, the public square has become openly hostile to religion. — Stephen L. Carter

He was vain and tended to surround himself with intellectual and moral pygmies. — Stephen L. Carter

Love is a gift we deliver when we would rather not. — Stephen L. Carter

There is much depressing evidence that the religious voice is required to stay out of the public square only when it is pressed in a conservative cause. — Stephen L. Carter

She had been carried away by the need to defend herself. — Stephen L. Carter

She and her late husband, Leander Cross, a prominent surgeon of the darker nation, were, in my childhood, perhaps the leading host of the Gold Coast party circuit, a circuit my parents traveled often, because it was, in those days, what one did: glittering dinner at one house on the Friday, champagne brunch at another on the Sunday, caterers, cooks, even temporary butlers at the ready as the best of black Washington charged about in mad imitation of white people's foolishness. — Stephen L. Carter

Being on the inside could be an addiction — Stephen L. Carter

This isn't about your reputation. Our job right now is to make sure that there to ARE future historians. — Stephen L. Carter

The victors always think they are righteous. But then, they always seem to start a mighty unrighteous squabbling over the spoils. — Stephen L. Carter

If people believe that they are marrying out of love and free choice rather than out of duty, they are more likely to decide, if love should die, that the free choice to join together is no more significant than the free choice to part, and to look for love elsewhere; those married out of duty expect less love to begin with, and what duty has brought together, duty may keep together. — Stephen L. Carter

So many people of liberal persuasion value their own progressive opinions more than they value the people they hold those opinions about. — Stephen L. Carter

Jonathan had been around Washington long enough to know that no offer was exactly what it seemed. — Stephen L. Carter

In a crisis, time was always the enemy. — Stephen L. Carter

It is difficult to trust someone not raised to doctrine. — Stephen L. Carter

On the opening day of law school at Yale, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you. — Stephen L. Carter

We often ask our citizens to split their public and private selves, telling them in effect that it is fine to be religious in private, but there is something askew when those private beliefs become the basis for public action. — Stephen L. Carter

The only way to prove his willingness to wait would be to wait. — Stephen L. Carter

Love is an activity, not a feeling ... True love is not the helpless desire to possess the cherished object of one's fervent affection; true love is the disciplined generosity we require of ourselves for the sake of another when we would rather be selfish. — Stephen L. Carter

In our sensible zeal to keep religion from dominating our politics, we have created a political and legal culture that presses the religiously faithful to be other than themselves, to act publicly, and sometimes privately as well, as though their faith does not matter to them. — Stephen L. Carter

Every conflict plagues the peace that follows it. — Stephen L. Carter

Never act surprised in a courtroom. — Stephen L. Carter

Rumors chase the dead like flies, and we follow them with our prim noses. None of us are gossips, but we love listening to those who are. — Stephen L. Carter

Size and elaboration were often mistaken for importance. — Stephen L. Carter

She wasn't being methodological. She was being autobiographical. — Stephen L. Carter

To Tom, the march of technology was equivalent to the march of civilization. — Stephen L. Carter

People seem to remember the sacrifices they made more than what the sacrifices were for. — Stephen L. Carter