Laurell K. Hamilton Quotes

They all deserve to die. Even you, Mrs. Lovett Even I. Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief For the rest of us death would be relief.

...Ned always said that the man who passes the sentence should swing the blade, though he never took any joy in the duty. But I would, oh, yes.

When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.

In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which.

I am the Executioner. Murder someone in my town, and I’m the one that you get to see. Once.

There's always got to be room for what you might call benign corruption. Nobody blames a man who steals food to feed his starving children, but on the other hand, somebody who picks up a badge and takes an oath to serve and protect; we do expect a certain level of essential honesty.

I have always derived indescribable pleasure from leading a decent woman to the edge of sin and leaving her there to live between the temptation and the fear of that sin.

It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.

I do not see how a people that can find in its conscience any excuse whatever for slowly burning to death a human being, or for tolerating such an act, can be entrusted with the salvation of a race.

There's good and evil going on. We have cops. We have robbers.

Brown’s execution will make the gallows as glorious as the cross.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be either good or evil.

Arms are dangerous instruments and not necessarily forged for good. How can we safely entrust them to any but those who have schooled themselves in the precepts of the Classics and can use these weapons for the realization of Humanity and Righteousness? To quell violence and disorder, to repulse barbarians and brigands, to rescue living souls from agony and torture, to save the nation from imminent downfall-these are the true ends of Humanity and Righteousness.

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

You may, if you are an old-fashioned schoolmaster, wish to consider yourself full of universal benevolence and at the same time derive great pleasure from caning boys. In order to reconcile these two desires you have to persuade yourself that caning

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.

Do they deserve to die?" but "Do we deserve to kill them?

The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.

There comes a moment in every life when a choice must be made between right and wrong, between good and evil, between light and darkness. These decisions are made in an instant, but with repercussions that last a lifetime.

If some incarnation of evil as unambiguous as Hitler appeared again, I would have no moral qualms about killing the enemy. But in the modern world of moral murkiness, I prefer to keep my hands as clean of enemy blood as possible.

Where two motives, neither of them perfectly justifiable, may be assigned, the worst has the chance of being preferred.

He recalls what that first German soldier said to his major: No God-not yours or mine-approves of what you're doing.

Innocent people never deserve to die no matter what.

Understand the causes of terror? Yes, we should try, but let there be no moral ambiguity about this: nothing could ever justify the events of September 11 and it is to turn justice on its head to pretend it could