Susan in NC’s Reviews > The Financier > Status Update

“ Thus on and on he went, answering all of Steger's and Shannon's searching questions with the most engaging frankness, and you could have sworn from the solemnity with which he took it all—the serious business attention—that he was the soul of so–called commercial honor.”

“[Frank] was so calm, so jaunty, so defiant of life…These lawyers, this jury, this straw–and–water judge, these machinations of fate, did not…disturb or humble or weaken him…He believed in the financial rightness of the thing he had done…Life was war—particularly financial life; and strategy was its keynote, its duty, its necessity. Why should he bother about petty, picayune minds which could not understand this?”

“ He had no respect for judges—he knew too much about them. He knew how often they were sycophants, political climbers, political hacks, tools, time–servers, judicial door–mats lying before the financially and politically great and powerful who used them as such. Judges were fools, as were most other people in this dusty, shifty world.”

“Lawyers in the main were intellectual mercenaries to be bought and sold in any cause. It amused him… to see how readily they would lie, steal, prevaricate, misrepresent in almost any cause and for any purpose. Great lawyers were merely great unscrupulous subtleties, like himself, sitting back in dark, close–woven lairs like spiders and awaiting the approach of unwary human flies.”

“In the silly mind of the general public the various judges of Quarter Sessions, like girls incarcerated in boarding–schools, were supposed in their serene aloofness from life not to know what was going on in the subterranean realm of politics; but they knew well enough, and, knowing particularly well from whence came their continued position and authority, they were duly grateful.”

“From one source and another he learned that Butler had some private grudge against Cowperwood. What it was no one seemed to know exactly. The general impression was that Cowperwood had led Butler into some unwholesome financial transactions. Anyhow, it was generally understood that for the good of the party…. Cowperwood was to be punished quite as severely as Stener for the moral effect on the community.”

“ Butler…had seen his little daughter grow into radiantly beautiful womanhood... He had furnished her the money to be so fine. He would continue to do so. No second–rate upstart of a man should be allowed to ruin her life. He proposed to take care of her always—to leave her so much money in a legally involved way that a failure of a husband could not possibly affect her.”

“He had fallen so low in his parental feeling as to spy on her and expose her before other men—strangers, detectives, Cowperwood. What real affection could she have for him after this? He had made a mistake, according to her. He had done a foolish and a contemptible thing, which was not warranted however bad her actions might have been… She would never forgive her father for this—never, never, never!”

“Morality and immorality? He never considered them. But strength and weakness—oh, yes! If you had strength you could protect yourself always and be something. If you were weak—pass quickly to the rear…He was strong, and he knew it, and somehow he always believed in his star. Something—he could not say what—it was the only metaphysics he bothered about—was doing something for him.”

“…he had never once lost his head or his courage. That thing conscience, which obsesses and rides some people to destruction, did not trouble him at all. He had no consciousness of what is currently known as sin. There were just two faces to the shield of life from the point of view of his peculiar mind–strength and weakness. Right and wrong?…Good and evil? Those were toys of clerics, by which they made money.”