Top 100 Don Winslow Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart.”

— Don Winslow

2. “And the most dangerous place on earth – Is where you’re safe.”

— Don Winslow

3. “Maybe money can’t buy happiness, but it can rent it for a long time.”

— Don Winslow

4. “Deliver my soul from the sword. My love from the power of the dog.”

— Don Winslow

5. “Dope is supposed to be bad, but in a bad world it’s good.”

— Don Winslow

6. “I would prefer things to be peaceful and not have conflict.”

— Don Winslow

7. “The lost, the lonely, the bicultural misfits with a foot in two worlds and a place in neither. And.”

— Don Winslow

8. “We will go to heaven or we will go to hell, but we will go together.”

— Don Winslow

9. “Sad Fact of Life – Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart. Never. Ever.”

— Don Winslow

10. “You can either love,” Pablo says, “or you can talk about it. You can’t do both.”

— Don Winslow

11. “They say that love conquers all. They’re wrong, Keller thinks. Hate conquers all. It even conquers hate.”

— Don Winslow

12. “When the devil comes, he comes on angel’s wings.”

— Don Winslow

13. “He who speaks least has the most power.”

— Don Winslow

14. “Satan can only tempt you with what you already have.”

— Don Winslow

15. “If you let people believe that you are weak, sooner or later you’re going to have to kill them.”

— Don Winslow

16. “How much more money do we have to waste, how many more families have to be destroyed, how many more people have to be killed before you summon the courage to tell the truth to the American people?”

— Don Winslow

17. “A border is something that divides us but also unites us; there can be no real wall, just as there is no wall that divides the human soul between its best impulses and its worst.”

— Don Winslow

18. “Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground. And for what? So North Americans can get high.”

— Don Winslow

19. “There is no water to put out the fire. Mi canto la esperanza. – Carlos Santana “Maria Maria.”

— Don Winslow

20. “Perhaps loneliness – it is that loneliest time of the night, the predawn darkness when the worst dreams come, the sunrise seems far off, and the creatures that inhabit both the real world and the darker edges of the unconscious prowl with the impunity of predators who know that their prey is helpless and alone.”

— Don Winslow

21. “Brian is obese, like round, like the Pillsbury doughboy on a Twinkie binge.”

— Don Winslow

22. “People don’t run the cartel; the cartel runs people.”

— Don Winslow

23. “Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart. Never. Ever. ‘You can come down the evolutionary ladder,’ Chon has observed to Ben and O; ’you can’t climb up.”

— Don Winslow

24. “You call the wolf, you get the pack.”

— Don Winslow

25. “If that’s all that troubles you, here, take my veil, wrap it round your head and hold your tongue. Then take this basket; put on a girdle, card wool, munch beans. The War shall be women’s business.”

— Don Winslow

26. “As for corruption, who’s more corrupt – the seller or the buyer? And how corrupt does a society have to be when its citizens need to get high to escape their reality, at the cost of bloodshed and suffering of their neighbors?”

— Don Winslow

27. “It is high time for us to arise from sleep. – Romans 13:11.”

— Don Winslow

28. “In the words of Oscar Wilde, ‘I can resist everything but temptation.”

— Don Winslow

29. “New York City has the strictest gun laws in the country but that doesn’t make any difference because all the guns come in from the outside, up the “Iron Pipeline.”

— Don Winslow

30. “There are various kinds of savagery: emotional, spiritual, economic, and cultural savagery.”

— Don Winslow

31. “Union Station was a perfect representative of the city. Sad, drab, dirty, and hopeless, it was the right place to enter Providence. You didn’t get your hopes up.”

— Don Winslow

32. “The Mexicans have finally found a drug that white trash likes and can afford. And one thing you ain’t never gonna run out of is white trash.”

— Don Winslow

33. “Beware the hospitality of the sociopath.”

— Don Winslow

34. “They got the absolute freedom to choose what we want them to.”

— Don Winslow

35. “He became his own blues song, a Tom Waits loser, a Kerouac saint, a Springsteen hero under the lights of the American highway and the neon glow of the American strip. A fugitive, a sharecropper, a hobo, a cowboy who knows that he’s running out of prairie but rides anyway because there’s nothing left but to ride.”

— Don Winslow

36. “The good things in this world aren’t done by saints. They’re done by compromised people doing the best they can.”

— Don Winslow

37. “I never think about a movie when I’m writing a book, because I think only two things could happen and both of them are bad. You write a lousy novel and a lousy film.”

— Don Winslow

38. “He’s hunted enough guys to know that their own heads can be their worst enemies. They start seeing things that aren’t there, then, worse, not seeing things that are. They worry and worry, and chew on their own insides, until, when you do track them down, they’re almost grateful. By this time, they’ve been killed so many times in their minds that the real thing is a relief.”

— Don Winslow

39. “We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees.”

— Don Winslow

40. “I start work at 5 in the morning and I have a wicked insomnia problem.”

— Don Winslow

41. “Betrayals start that way, with lies hidden in the shadows of silence.”

— Don Winslow

42. “You need the money, the cash flow, but it’s more than that, admit it. You love the game. The thrill, the taking off the bad guys, even the danger, the idea that you might get caught.”

— Don Winslow

43. “I don’t know what the hell I was doing, all right?! I don’t recognize myself. I don’t know who I am anymore. And it’s all fun and games until someone loses an I.”

— Don Winslow

44. “Together, Ben and Chon make up a collective pacifist. Ben is the paci Chon is the fist.”

— Don Winslow

45. “There has always been philosophical speculation on the question, What if there were no God? Keller thinks as he walks through the slush. But no one has really asked, much less answered, the question, What if there were no Satan?”

— Don Winslow

46. “Life is trying to kill us,” she says. Life, Malone thinks, is trying to kill everyone. And it always succeeds. Sometimes before you die.”

— Don Winslow

47. “We are all cripples, Keller thinks, limping together through this crippled world. It’s what we owe to each other.”

— Don Winslow

48. “Life’s like a fat orange, Frank thinks. When you’re young, you squeeze it hard and fast, trying to get all the juice in a hurry. When you’re older, you squeeze it slowly, savoring every drop. Because, one, you don’t know how many drops you have left, and, two, the last drops are the sweetest.”

— Don Winslow

49. “When you ask people, “What’s America’s longest war?” they usually answer “Vietnam” or amend that to “Afghanistan,” but it’s neither. America’s longest war is the war on drugs.”

— Don Winslow

50. “Mexico is a country where the temples of the new gods are built on the gravesites of the old.”

— Don Winslow