James Carlos Blake Quotes

He was the deadliest man in Texas, on that they all agreed.

The notion that we've made vast moral progress and are now a less violent species is belied by our awesome powers of destruction, our military might, police forces as well-armed as soldiers. Without the threat of such violent force behind it, all law would be meaningless. I prefer stories that remind us of that. At its core, history is a story of violence at work. It all comes down to the old saw that, however much you can gain with a kind word, you can gain more with a kind word and a gun.

Take out all but one bullet and it was Russian Roulette. In Mexican Roulette, as he'd heard it defined, you took out only one. In Drunk Mexican Roulette you didn't take out any.

There's an old saying," Buck said. "A hundred things can go wrong in a holdup, and if you can think of fifty of them you're a damn genius.

Never did I fight for the poor. I fought against the rich
which of course isn't at all the same thing. In any case, the fighting was the point. You don't fight to become free
to fight is to be free. A man with a gun and the will to use it can't be mastered, he can only be killed.

If you're afraid to defend your convictions because you might get your ass kicked for it, you're not really fit to advocate for them.

I understood more clearly than ever that the line between a noble revolutionary and a lowdown bandit was the line between war and peace.

Sex and violence ... are the two great engines of the world.

We don't permit anyone to tell us our business, nor do we wish to tell anyone his. The same goes for moral outlooks. Don't tread on us and we won't on you. We're a tolerant, liberty-loving bunch, we Wolfes.

Without the right to defend yourself
and the right to possesss the means to do it
all other supposed rights are so much hot air.

I've never been given to casual use of vulgar language
unwarranted profanity implies mental laziness
but there's no other way to say this: a guy tries to fuck me ... well, fuck him.

Just because it's a world of thieves out there don't mean there ain't no rules to it.

They loved the sea. They taught themselves to sail, to navigate and read the weather. Without their mother's knowledge and long before she thought them old enough to sail outside the harbor, they were piloting their catboat all the way to the Isles of Shoals. They were on the return leg of one such excursion when the fickle weather of early spring took an abrupt turn and the sky darkened and the sun vanished and the wind came squalling off the open sea. They were a half mile from the harbor when the storm overtook them. The rain struck in a slashing torrent and the swells hove them so high they felt they might be sent flying--then dropped them into troughs so deep they could see nothing but walls of water the color of iron. They feared the sail would be ripped away. Samuel Thomas wrestled the tiller and John Roger bailed in a frenzy and both were wide-eyed with euphoric terror as time and again they were nearly capsized before at last making the harbor. When they got home and Mary Margaret saw their sodden state she scolded them for dunces and wondered aloud how they could do so well in their schooling when they didn't have sense enough to get out of the rain.

The shed of leaves became a cascade of red and gold and after a time the trees stood skeletal against a sky of weathered tin. The land lay bled of its colors. The nights lengthened, went darker, brightened in their clustered stars. The chilled air smelled of wood smoke, of distances and passing time. Frost glimmered on the morning fields. Crows called across the pewter afternoons.

Now all the gang's dead except for me and Russell.

One of the greatest of human follies is that we think we know ourselves so well, that we know how we would act under any conditions, that we would under any circumstance 'do the right thing.' Well, as many have discovered, you don't really know what you'll do in the dark till the lights go out.

The only things you can ever truly own cannot be bought with money.

The vastness of the desert frightened her. Everything looked too far away, even the couldless sky. There was nowhere you could hide in such emptiness.

History is a record of human nature in action.

He finally comprehended that the sole impossibility regarding human sorrow is to arrive at some unsurpassable limit to it.

Every single time it was grand. I loved the moment when you announce the stickup and everything suddenly goes brighter and sharper and the world seems to spin faster. You show them the gun and say hand it over and there's no telling what's going to happen in the next tick of the clock.

Pride has traditionally been regarded as the foremost of the Seven Deadly Sins, but it has rather obviously been overtaken by Greed.

A man who can laugh at himself is truly blessed, for he will never lack for amusement.

You do not tell people to go fuck themselves and then later when you're in trouble ask them to help you.

In the summer of 1845 Edward Little was sixteen years old and restless in his blood.