Every conflict plagues the peace t... - Stephen L. Carter - Quotes.Pub

Every conflict plagues the peace that follows it.

The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln Quotes

Stephen L. Carter Quotes

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.

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.

In real life there are indeed black people who have been in the middle class for generations, but in entertainment it’s as if they don’t exist.

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.

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.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

I think of my novels as entertainments.

I find it hard to think of myself as selling books. I don’t even have a Web site. I want to sit and write, not sell.

Nastiness devalues the speaker as well because the unwillingness to restrain the urge marks the speaker as less civilized, more animal-like.

To be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box. On the box is a label, not of my own choosing.

I bristle again. I have never liked being called clever, especially by residents of the paler nation. It never quite means the same thing as intelligent or even bright, but carries instead an intimation of a low animal cunning. Perhaps the semiotician in me overreacts in assuming that conversations are racially charged; but so many conversations are.

Even in 2012, if there’s a black character in the movies or on television that’s a professional, if we even hear about their backgrounds they’re always ’up from the streets.

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.

Rumor is rarely more interesting than fact, but it is always more readily available.

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

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.

I think that black fiction authors have to work very hard to avoid being typed as seeking only a black audience.

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.

Teasing out the way the world might look through another’s eyes is what makes the creative process so fascinating and enjoyable.

More than 20 years on, sustained competition, informed customers and the rapid growth of new technology provide the necessary environment for substantial deregulation.

If you’re fascinated by America, you’ll be fascinated by family.

When you shoot someone who is fleeing, it’s not self-defense. It’s an execution.

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.

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.

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.

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