The Stand

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“Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizen should be: partisans but never zealots, respecters of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely unable to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered . . . or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power.”

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“God doesn't bribe, child. He just makes a sign and lets people take it as they will.”
“The Lord provides strength, not taxicabs.”

“...you'll find that God often chooses to speak through the dying and the insane...A healthy person might be apt to filter the divine message, to alter it with his or her own personality. In other words, a healthy person might make a shitty prophet.”

A demon wearing a denim jacket that displays a button of a pig wearing a cop’s cap one the one lapel and the other with a smiling face button.

The sound that his well-worn, sharp-toed cowboy boots make as he walks the prison corridors to “save” Lloyd Heinrich. A face of true and dark evil.

“He was known, well known, along the highways in hiding that are traveled by the poor and the mad, by the professional revolutionaries and by those who have been taught to hate so well that their hate shows on their faces like harelips and they are unwanted except by others like them, who welcome them to cheap with slogans and posters on the walls, to basements where lengths of sawed-off pipe are held in padded vises while they are stuffed with high explosives, to back rooms where lunatic plans are laid.”

“He’s in the wolves… the crows, the rattlesnake, and the shadow of the owl at midnight and the scorpion at high noon. He roosts upside down with the bats. He’s blind like them.”

“‘Do you think… do you think people ever learn anything?’
She opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, fell silent. The kerosene lamp flickered. Her eyes seemed very blue.
‘I don’t know,’ she said at last. She seemed unpleased with her answer; she struggled to say something more; to illuminate her first response; and could only say it again:
‘I don’t know.’”

“There's precious little reform in the human race.”