Howard Fast Quotes

As you sell your soul and sow your seeds, and you wound yourself and your loved ones bleed. And your habits grow and your conscience feeds, on all that you thought you should be.

To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?

Once I had a better beat, I needed to have an even better one. And somewhere in that climbing, I lost sight of, sort of, my moral and ethical underpinnings.

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

Sometimes people with strong ideology, whether left-wing or right-wing, refuse to do something simply because they believe it is wrong, when doing it actually benefits them. For some people, it's not just about money and political power.

Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.

In those days the Communists talked like Democrats … We got along well enough until the Nazi-Stalin Pact …. Then my leftist associates started laying off Hitler and started ranting about the “imperialist war.”

The [Russian] Communist Party decided that policy. As a good communist, I have to go along.

The day of reckoning came by 1946. This year marks a watershed. As it dawned, it was becoming clear to most that the looked-for post-war World Revolution had been aborted, or at any rate, was not going to come off. A basic reorientation was forced on us [Communists].

For Trump staffers and enablers, the dilemma is different. There are few illusions about their leader left to be shattered. Their true challenge is less about surviving Trump's eruptions than simply living with the choice they've made, convincing themselves that service to the nation - passing a tax cut, forestalling a war, reducing immigration - is worth it.

Balance the cost of the soul you lost with the dreams you lightly sold.

I consider calmly the question of how much evil I should need to kill off my finer feelings.

Honor is a public enemy, and conscience a domestic, and he that would secure his pleasure, must pay a tribute to one and go halves with t'other.

Evil can do anything, for a price.

To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one s own conscience is to abandon mankind.

The greatest temptation for the like of us is: to renounce violence, to repent, to make peace with oneself. Most revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spartacus to Danton and Dostoevsky; they are the classical form of betrayal of the cause. The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. As long as chaos dominates the world, God is an anachronism; and every compromise with one’s own conscience is perfidy. When the accursed inner voice speaks to you, hold your hands over your ears….

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives.

Hero­ism breaks its heart, and ide­al­ism its back, on the intran­si­gence of the cred­u­lous and the mediocre, manip­u­lated by the cyn­i­cal and the corrupt.

He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business.

Heaven help me for the way I am, save me from these evil deeds before I get them done.

Few politicians are good at taking the high ground and throwing themselves off it.

Though there are still many good people out there in the world, it seems that they're vastly outnumbered by the stupid, selfish, violent ones.

Most vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful -- if strenuously led -- as Christian's in The Pilgrim's Progress.

The battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.