Innocent Man Destroyed Quotes

{T}hen he whispered something that turned Reed pale and bloodless--and that Reed wouldn't tell about until years later. 'You're the one lied about Meadow Creek,' Kelly said. 'Lied about finding her. Why would you do that to me?'

We left him there as the drawknife of dusk peeled back the world. ~ Matthew Neill Null

For, I think, when I woke up today, with a dream of yesterday still in my eyes,I felt tired in life. And thinking of the little blond girl of Mays & Junes long gone by,I felt strange looking on a field of wheat, and I thought, in a moment I was God and so was she, and this field was us too. So long gone, she goes. But I am still her, whether she comes and goes like all of life, or she stays awhile.
Once, a man of physics told me, matter cannot be created or destroyed. And on
another occasion he said everything came from one point, in the beginning.
So we are all flowers and rivers and trees. That was all of us together. Every one of the past, present, and future. ~ Derek Keck

The mice were furious."
[...]
"Oh yes," said the old man mildly.
"Yes well so I expect were the dogs and cats and duckbilled platypuses, but..."
"Ah, but they hadn't paid for it you see, had they?"
"Look," said Arthur, "would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?"
[...]
"Earthman, the planet you lived on was commissioned, paid for, and run by mice. It was destroyed five minutes before the completion of the purpose for which it was built, and we've got to build another one."
Only one word registered with Arthur.
"Mice?" he said.
"Indeed Earthman."
"Look, sorry - are we talking about the little white furry things with the cheese fixation and women standing on tables screaming in early sixties sit coms?"
Slartibartfast coughed politely.
"[...] These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vast hyperintelligent pandimensional beings. The whole business with the cheese and the squeaking is just a front."
The old man paused, and with a sympathetic frown continued.
"They've been experimenting on you, I'm afraid. ~ Douglas Adams

Hitler may have lost the war on the battlefield, but he ended up winning something too," says Marek Halter, "because man in the twentieth century created the concentration camp and revived torture and taught his fellow men that it is possible to close their eyes to the misfortunes of others." Perhaps he is right: There are abandoned children, massacred civilians, innocent people imprisoned, lonely old people, drunks in the gutter, madmen in power. But perhaps he isn't right at all, for there are also Warriors of the Light. And Warriors of the Light never accept what is unacceptable. ~ Paulo Coelho

Womanhood is a wonderful thing. In womankind we find the mothers of the race.There is no man so great, nor none sunk so low, but once he lay a helpless, innocent babe in a woman's arms and was dependent on her love and care for his existence. It is woman who rocks the cradle of the world and holds the first affections of mankind. She possesses a power beyond that of a king on his throne.
... Womanhood stands for all that is pure and clean and noble. She who does not make the world better for having lived in it has failed to be all that a woman should be. ~ Mabel Hale

I am not a criminal, for I destroyed a bad man. I thought I was right. ~ Gavrilo Princip

She didn't want to handle him. She didn't want anything to do with him - this man with his cold, intense eyes and clipped speech, this stranger, this Yankee. He made her feel like a rabbit facing a cobra: terrified, but fascinated at the same time. He tried to hide his ruthlessness behind smooth, cosmopolitan manners, but Evie had no doubts about the real nature of the man.

He wanted her. He intended to have her. And he wouldn't care if he destroyed her in the taking. ~ Linda Howard

Man was the outlaw, the rebel, the distorted shape that scarred the earth, the voice that silenced the music of Eden, the hand that raised up obscenities and blasphemies. Man was the pariah-dog, the moral leper in this translucent mirror of Heaven. He was the muddier of crystal waters, the despoiler of forests, the murderer of the innocent, the challenger against God. He was the assassin of the saints and the prophets, for they spoke of what he WOULD NOT HEAR, in the darkness of his spirit! ~ Taylor Caldwell

The young man, who does not know the future, sees life as a kind of epic adventure, an Odyssey through strange seas and unknown islands, where he will test and prove his powers, and thereby discover his immortality. The man of middle years, who has lived the future that he once dreamed, sees life as a tragedy; for he has learned that his power, however great, will not prevail against those forces of accident and nature to which he gives the names of gods, and has learned that he is mortal. But the man of age, if he plays his assigned role properly, must see life as a comedy. For his triumphs and his failures merge, and one is no more the occasion for pride or shame than the other; and he is neither the hero who proves himself against those forces, nor the protagonist who is destroyed by them. Like any poor, pitiable shell of an actor, he comes to see that he has played so many parts that there no longer is himself. ~ John Edward Williams

I was going to have to face the man who'd destroyed my kingdom, and the boy who was the reason. ~ Jodi Meadows

It is for no particular item in the tax-bill that I refuse to pay it. I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdrawand stand aloof from it effectually. I do not care to trace the course of my dollar, if I could, till it buys a man or a musket to shoot one with,
the dollar is innocent,
but I am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance. In fact, I quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion, though I will still make what use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in such cases. ~ Henry David Thoreau

That which man builds man destroys, but the city of God is built by God and cannot be destroyed by man. AUGUSTINE ~ Charles W. Colson

Circumstances may accumulate so strongly even against an innocent man, that directed, sharpened, and pointed, they may slay him. ~ Charles Dickens

As the innocent infant relies upon the mother for sustenance, so the innocent wanderer, following his native compassion and bliss, relies upon the natural intelligence of life to sustain him. There are various Ways. There is the Way of salvation by the law of Buddha, the Way of Confucius governing the Way of learning, the Way of healing as a doctor, as a poet teaching the Way of Waka, tea, archery, and many arts and skills. Each man practices as he feels inclined. ~ Miyamoto Musashi

It turned out that the Germans were not, in fact, a master race. Hitler had accepted this possibility when he invaded the Soviet Union: "If the German people is not strong enough and devoted enough to give its blood for its existence, let it go and be destroyed by another, stronger man. I shall not shed tears for the German people." Over the course of the war, Hitler changed his attitude towards the Soviet Union and the Russians: Stalin was not a tool of the Jews but their enemy, the USSR was not or was no longer Jewish, and its population turned out, upon investigation, not to be subhuman. In the end, Hitler decided, "the future belongs entirely to the stronger people of the east. ~ Timothy Snyder

But we have not used our waters well. Our major rivers are defiled by noxious debris. Pollutants from cities and industries kill the fish in our streams. Many waterways are covered with oil slicks and contain growths of algae that destroy productive life and make the water unfit for recreation. "Polluted Water-No Swimming" has become a familiar sign on too many beaches and rivers. A lake that has served many generations of men now can be destroyed by man in less than one generation. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

Women ... They insist on being loving and kind and caring, and why do they do that? To make a man feel guilty, that's why. And then they lure innocent men who are busy with important scientific research into impregnating them, and then said busy men end up caring about said spawn. And these ladies smell good, too. Deliberately. The wenches. ~ Katie MacAlister

Bachofen, furthermore, is perfectly right in contending that the transition from what he calls "hetaerism" or "incestuous generation" to monogamy was brought about mainly by women. The more in the course of economic development, undermining the old communism and increasing the density of population, the traditional sexual relations lost their innocent character suited to the primitive forest, the more debasing and oppressive they naturally appeared to women; and the more they consequently longed for relief by the right of chastity, of temporary or permanent marriage with one man. This progress could not be due to men for the simple reason that they never, even to this day, had the least intention of renouncing the pleasures of actual group marriage. Not until the women had accomplished the transition to the pairing family could the men introduce strict monogamy - true, only for women. The ~ Friedrich Engels

He had always wanted to write music, and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the first phrases of Tchaikovsky's First Concerto
or the last movement of Rachmaninoff's Second. Men have not found the words for it, nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the music. Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don't help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don't work for my happiness, my brothers
show me yours
show me that it is possible
show me your achievement
and the knowledge will give me courage for mine. ~ Ayn Rand

A sincere man who sits down at night and pens that which his soul believes to be right, that which his soul tells him will be good for humanity, is exercising a power over the world that is beneficial. We should hail that expression of greatness, of goodness, with thanksgiving. But the insincere man, the man who will sit down at night and distort facts, who will wilfully misrepresent truth, who is a traitor to the divine within him which is calling, nay longing for truth, what shall we say of that man? He is publishing falsehoods to the world, giving poison to young, innocent souls who are longing for truth. Oh, there is no condemnation too strong for the hypocrite, for the betrayer of Christ. We will not condemn him, but God will, in His justice; He must.

Too much time is taken up by our young people, and by our older ones, too, in reading useless pamphlets, useless books; "It is worse than useless," says Farrar, in that excellent little work on "Great Books:". . . .

Men in Israel, it is time that we take a stand against vile literature. It is poisonous to the soul. It is the duty of a parent to put the poison, that is in the house, on the highest shelf, away from that innocent little child who knows not the danger of it. It is the duty of the parent also to keep the boy's mind from becoming polluted with the vile trash that is sometimes scattered--nay, that is daily distributed among us. There is inconsistency in a man's kneeling down with his family i ~ David O. McKay

There is no client as scary as an innocent man.
J. Michael Haller, Criminal Defense Attorney, Los Angeles, 1962. ~ Michael Connelly

In that moment, she knew she was seeing him not just as a damaged Subject who needed her, but as a man. Naïve, young, hurt -- but a man nonetheless. And he barely realized it. He was like an abandoned boy in the body of a twenty-four year old; innocent where he should be experienced and experienced where he should be innocent. ~ Mirriam Neal

An innocent man, if accused, can be acquitted; a guilty man, unless accused, cannot be condemned. It is, however, more advantageous to absolve an innocent than not to prosecute a guilty man. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Nowhere in this universe does evil exist except in the mind of mankind. only man can take an idea or symbol which is so simple and innocent, and then twist it and corrupt it until it is something to hate or kill one another over. ~ Andrew James Pritchard

(letters) They were like a kelp forest, they cast a weird green light, you could get lost there, become tangled and drown.
... still eyeing the letters like Portuguese man-of-wars floating on the innocent sea. ~ Janet Fitch

Walter Wagner, the man who had gone to court to stop the Large Hadron Collider from beginning operations. A serious charge had been leveled: the LHC was a hazard to the very existence of life on earth. JO: So, roughly speaking, what are the chances the world is going to be destroyed? Is it one in a million, one in a billion? WW: Well, the best we can say right now is about a one-in-two chance. JO: Hold on a second. It's ... fifty-fifty? WW: Yeah, fifty-fifty ... If you have something that can happen, and something that won't necessarily happen, it's going to either happen, or it's going to not happen, and, so, the best guess is one in two. JO: I'm not sure that's how probability works, Walter. ~ Sean Carroll

I hope Lily told you how happy I was by the offer to marry your commander."
"She mentioned it," Ranulf grimaced.
"Who knows? Maybe Rolande and I will meet and decide to stay together, forgoing the annulment."
Ranulf rocked back on his feet, picking up the basin, and stood up, causing water to slosh on to the floor from the abrupt movement. She sounded so damn happy. He plopped the water bowl back on its table. And why shouldn't she be? "You will like my commander. He is as handsome as Lillabet is beautiful."
Pain flashed in Bronwyn's eyes, turning them dark, almost black. If Ranulf's aim had been to hurt,he had struck true, resulting in a desire to inflict similar anguish. "As long as he doesn't lie to me and make me out the fool, I will be content."
"I suspect he won't if you don't lie to him first."
Bronwyn pushed herself out of the chair as a frisson of anger shot up her spine. "Maybe I won't if he doesn't order me away from my home without the courage to look me in the eye when he does so."
"I never pretended to be someone else."
"In that you are correct, my lord.You made it very clear from the beginning that you were a hateful man," she seethed.
"Didn't seem to bother you when you used your female wiles to entice me to your bed," Ranulf hissed back.
Bronwyn marched over to the door and swung it wide open. "I wonder just how my sister will deal with your barbarism. She is sweet,beautiful, and innocent,but she also knows no ~ Michele Sinclair

Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the wealth they owe to science, our societies are still trying to practice and to teach systems of values already destroyed at the roots by that very science. Man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe, whence which he has emerged by chance. His duty, like his fate, is written nowhere. ~ Jacques Monod

We must realize that we are all, like Dr. Faust, ready to accept the devil's inducements. The devil is in each one of us in the form of an ego that promises the fulfillment of desire on condition that we become subservient to its striving to dominate. The domination of the personality by the ego is a diabolical perversion of the nature of man. The ego was never intended to be the master of the body, but its loyal and obedient servant. The body, as opposed to the ego, desires pleasure, not power. Bodily pleasure is the source from which all our good feelings and good thinking stems. If the bodily pleasure of an individual is destroyed, he becomes an angry, frustrated, and hateful person. His thinking becomes distorted, and his creative potential is lost. He develops self-destructive attitudes. ~ Alexander Lowen

What distinguishes consciousness of self
from the world of nature is not the simple act of contemplation by which it identifies itself with the
exterior world and finds oblivion, but the desire it can feel with regard to the world. This desire reestablishes
its identity when it demonstrates that the exterior world is something apart. In its desire, the
exterior world consists of what it does not possess, but which nevertheless exists, and of what it would
like to exist but which no longer does. Consciousness of self is therefore, of necessity, desire. But in order
to exist it must be satisfied, and it can only be satisfied by the gratification of its desire. It therefore acts in
order to gratify itself and, in so doing, it denies and suppresses its means of gratification. It is the epitome
of negation. To act is to destroy in order to give birth to the spiritual reality of consciousness. But to
destroy an object unconsciously, as meat is destroyed, for example, in the act of eating, is a purely animal
activity. To consume is not yet to be conscious. Desire for consciousness must be directed toward
something other than unconscious nature. The only thing in the world that is distinct from nature is,
precisely, self-consciousness. Therefore desire must be centered upon another form of desire; selfconsciousness
must be gratified by another form of self-consciousness. In simple words, man is not
recognized - and ~ Albert Camus

The townsfolk in their darkened rooms were dazed as if by some cataclysm, some devastating earthquake, against which all wisdom and all resistance is of no avail. Such a feeling is produced every time the established order of things is upset, when security is destroyed and everything is hitherto protected by the laws of man or nature is suddenly at the mercy of wild unreasoning brutality. ~ Guy De Maupassant

A friend of mine, Phil Lomax, told me this story about a blind man with a pistol shooting at a man who had slapped him on the subway train and killing an innocent bystander peacefully reading his newspaper across the aisle and I thought, damn right, sounds just like today's news, riots in the ghettos, war in Vietnam, masochistic doings in the Middle East. And then I thought of some of our loudmouthed leaders urging our vulnerable soul brothers on to getting themselves killed, and thought further that all unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol. (Preface) ~ Chester Himes

He wasn't a hero. He wasn't the man who stepped forward and saved the innocent. He was lost himself. Shadows had invaded a long time ago and stolen his life. But he would give anything he had left to be the man who found a way to save Judith ~ Christine Feehan

Jesus Christ was innocent too,' said Svejk, 'and all the same they crucified him. No one anywhere has ever worried about a man being innocent. Maul halten und weiter dienen ['Grin and bear it and get on with the job'] - as they used to tell us in the army. That's the best and finest thing of all. ~ Jaroslav Hasek

Parker looked distressed. He had confidence in Wimsey's judgment, and, in spite of his own interior certainty, he felt shaken.
"My dear man, where's the flaw in [this case]?"
"There isn't one ... There's nothing wrong about it at all, except that the girl's innocent. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I have the body - they didn't have to tell me that - or that I am innocent looking enough to drive the man crazy, but I blushed when they call me pretty. ~ Jennifer Loren

She was trying to become invisible in the snow. Sudden terror had seized her: the thought of the man whose ice-blue eyes had a magnetic power which could deprive her of will and thrust her down into hallucination and horror. The fear she lived with, always near her, close behind the world's normal façade, had become concentrated on him. And there was another connected with him, they were in league together, or perhaps they were the same person.
Both of them persecuted her, she did not understand why. But she accepted the fact as she accepted all the things that happened to her, expecting to be ill-treated, to be made a victim, ultimately to be destroyed, either by unknown forces or by human beings. This fate seemed always to have been waiting for her, ever since time began. Only love might have saved her from it. But she had never looked for love. Her part was to suffer; that was known and accepted. Fatality brought resignation. It was no use fighting against her fate. She knew she had been beaten before the start. ~ Anna Kavan

Besides, my usefulness here is destroyed because all of my friends think me a man of unsound mind. ~ Alex Campbell

Just as the line of astronomical thinkers from Copernicus to Newton had destroyed the old astronomy, in which the earth was the center, and the Almighty sitting above the firmament the agent in moving the heavenly bodies about it with his own hands, so now a race of biological thinkers had destroyed the old idea of a Creator minutely contriving and fashioning all animals to suit the needs and purposes of man. ~ Andrew Dickson White

In any case one can never forbear to smile at such a despairer, who, humanly speaking, although he is in despair, is so very innocent. Commonly such a despairer is infinitely comic. Think of a self (and next to God there is nothing so eternal as a self), and then that this self gets the notion of asking whether it might not let itself become or be made into another ... than itself. And yet such a despairer, whose only wish is this most crazy of all transformations, loves to think that this change might be accomplished as easily as changing a coat. For the immediate man does not recognize his self, he recognizes himself only by his dress, he recognizes (and here again appears the infinitely comic trait) he recognizes that he has a self only by externals. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the sins of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her, that his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies and her prey, and as such had no right to live. To appeal to her, was made hopeless by her having no sense of pity, even for herself. If she had been laid low in the streets, in any of the many encounters in which she had been engaged, she would not have pitied herself; nor, if she had been ordered to the axe to-morrow, would she have gone to it with any softer feeling than a fierce desire to change places with the man who sent her there. ~ Charles Dickens

How many does it take to metamorphose wickedness into righteousness? One man must not kill. If he does, it is murder ... But a state or nation may kill as many as they please, and it is not murder. It is just, necessary, commendable, and right. Only get people enough to agree to it, and the butchery of myriads of human beings is perfectly innocent. But how many does it take? ~ Adin Ballou

I am a star, a twinkling star. I'm an infant on the edge of a grave and an old man in a cradle, both a fish in the sky and a bird in the sea. I'm a boy on the outside but a girl on the inside, innocent in body, guilty in soul. ~ Fridrik Erlings

It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent - what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness -
between you, there is nothing to forgive -
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn't matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons. ~ Jane Hirshfield

And you have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of your foot on innocent cupboard doors it was only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void. ~ Jack Kerouac

Volume II: Chapter V
What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident. Day by day we are forced to believe this. He whom a scratch has disorganized, he who disappears from apparent life under the influence of the hostile agency at work around us, had the same powers as I - I also am subject to the same laws. In the face of all this we call ourselves lords of the creation, wielders of the elements, masters of life and death, and we allege in excuse of this arrogance, that though the individual is destroyed, man continues for ever. ~ Mary Shelley

I was never more sure of anything. He's as innocent as you and I. So that's my word. You go out of here. Go find some honest cop, tell him what I've told you. Tell him to find Tino Gonsmart. Tell him that a guy named Alex Luxtro doesn't want the case reopened. If that doesn't scare him so bad he runs, then you got yourself the man." "Are ~ Harry Whittington

But I'm a selfish man. I've wanted you since you fell into my office. You are exquisite, honest, warm, strong, witty, beguilingly innocent; the list is endless. I'm in awe of you. I want you, and the thought of anyone else having you is like a knife twisting in my dark soul. ~ E.L. James

But how will you bear an absentminded man who, if he happens to see you, will kill you? That is what tries the nerves, abstraction combined with cruelty. Men have felt it sometimes when they went through wild forests, and felt that the animals there were at once innocent and pitiless. They might ignore or slay. How would you like to pass ten mortal hours in a parlour with an absent-minded tiger? ~ G.K. Chesterton

There is NO LIFE if it's a programmed mind. Listen to the struggling kid inside, and follow the innocent unbiased zeal; YOU ARE ONE STEP CLOSER TO YOU.
Never fall in to the trap of traditional rationales, which only evaluates in terms of transactions which leads to somebody else's goals someday.
Time is Man-Made, Calendar is Man-Made to help us, not to disturb us, Set your own time, and allow the inner explosion to express itself.
YOU ARE ONE STEP CLOSER TO YOU ~ Ansh - The Mystic Rider