Top 90 Patrick Radden Keefe Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “The bomb exploded, killing five people, but not Thatcher. The IRA issued a statement, eloquently capturing the strategic advantage of terrorism: ‘Today we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

2. “There is a concept in psychology called ‘moral injury,’ notion, distinct from the idea of trauma, that relates to the ways in which ex-soldiers make sense of the socially transgressive things they have done during wartime. Price felt a sharp sense of moral injury: she believed that she had been robbed of any ethical justification for her own conduct.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

3. “He must have known, or at least suspected, that she was herself a member of the IRA, but they would argue, amiably, about politics as if they were a couple of graduate students, rather than adversaries in a bloody guerrilla war. At one point, Corden-Lloyd told her that he would love to come back and see her in ten years’ time, ’and we could all tell each other the whole truth.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

4. “It is not those who inflict the most but those who suffer the most who will conquer.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

5. “Who should be held accountable for a shared history of violence? It was a question that was dogging Northern Ireland as a whole.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

6. “Outrage is conditioned not by the nature of the atrocity but by the affiliation of the victim and the perpetrator. Should the state be accorded more leniency because, legally speaking, it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force? Or, conversely, should we hold soldiers and cops to a higher standard than paramilitaries?”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

7. “In 1689, Protestant forces loyal to William of Orange, the new king, had managed to hold the city against a siege by a Catholic army loyal to James II.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

8. “As Dolours struggled in the water, she locked eyes with one attacker, a man with a club, and for the rest of her life she would return to that moment, the way his eyes were glazed with hate. She looked into those eyes and saw nothing.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

9. “Outrage is conditioned not by the nature of the atrocity but by the affiliation of the victim and the perpetrator.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

10. “Once, in the summer of 1995, Adams gave a speech at a rally in Belfast. He looked like a politician, in a crisp summer suit, consulting his cue cards. But during a pause in his prepared remarks, someone in the crowd shouted, “Bring back the IRA!” As the audience cheered, Adams chuckled and smiled. Then he leaned into the microphone and said, “They haven’t gone away, you know.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

11. “I think Upton Sinclair once wrote that a man has difficulty understanding something if his salary depends on his not understanding.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

12. “History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

13. “It was about the hysteria, the mythmaking, and the misunderstanding that had twisted.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

14. “The body is a fantastic machine,’ Hughes told Mackers in one of his Boston College interviews, recounting the grueling sequence of a hunger strike. ‘It’ll eat off all the fat tissue first, then it starts eating away at the muscle, to keep your brain alive.’ Long after Hughes and Price called an end to their strikes and attempted to reintegrate into society, the nursed old grudges and endlessly replayed their worst wartime abominations. In a sense, they never stopped devouring themselves.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

15. “An overdose could induce respiratory failure: you fall into a sleep so deep and blissful that you stop breathing. At small hospitals, patients were being admitted close to death. In trailers and dingy apartments and remote farmhouses, police and paramedics would arrive to a familiar scene – the OxyContin overdose – and set about trying to revive the user.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

16. “But even if your parents were ardent supporters of the IRA, there were reasons not to tell them that you had joined. If the police or the army broke down the door to interrogate them, the less they knew, the better.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

17. “The agreement was known as a tontine, an antique investment instrument, with origins in seventeenth-century Europe, in which a number of participants band together in what is effectively a mortality lottery, pooling their funds with an understanding that the last investor to die will win everything.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

18. “But the truth was that most residents still lived in neighborhoods circumscribed by religion, and more than 90 percent of children in Northern Ireland continued to attend segregated elementary schools.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

19. “It was Arthur Sackler who would be credited not just with this campaign but with revolutionizing the whole field of medical advertising. In the words of one of his longtime employees at McAdams, when it came to the marketing of pharmaceuticals, “Arthur invented the wheel.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

20. “Dating back to the Iliad, ancient Egypt and beyond, burial rites have formed a critical function in most human societies. Whether we cremate a loved one or inter her bones, humans possess a deep-set instinct to mark death in some deliberate, ceremonial fashion. Perhaps the cruelest feature of forced disappearance as an instrument of war is that it denies the bereaved any such closure, relegating them to a permanent limbo of uncertainty.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

21. “This had become a mantra for Isaac. If you lose a fortune, you can always earn another, he pointed out. But if you lose your good name, you can never get it back.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

22. “In 1996, Purdue had introduced a groundbreaking drug, a powerful opioid painkiller called OxyContin, which was heralded as a revolutionary way to treat chronic pain. The drug became one of the biggest blockbusters in pharmaceutical history, generating some $35 billion in revenue.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

23. “Like casino employees talking about an especially profligate gambler, the sales reps referred to these doctors as “whales.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

24. “We beat them with stones at first, and they had guns. Our people had to go and get guns. Wouldn’t they have been right stupid people to stand there? Our people got shotguns at first and then got better weapons. And then the British, who were supposed to protect us, came in and raided our homes. What way could you fight? So you went down and you blew them up.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

25. “Barbara Moulton who had spent five years as a drug examiner at the FDA before resigning in protest. The agency had “failed utterly” in its task of policing the way prescription drugs were marketed and sold, she testified. Moulton described an environment at the FDA of unrelenting pressure from the drug companies and a culture in which regulators, rather than regulate the drug companies and their products, showed slavish deference to the private sector.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

26. “Even cancer doctors had no clue about how to address the physical agony caused by the disease, he said. “They don’t know how to treat it because they haven’t been taught how to treat it.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

27. “But people had figured out that if you crushed the pills – even if you just chewed them with your teeth – you could override the controlled-release mechanism and unleash a mammoth hit of pure oxycodone. It did not take much trial and error to make this discovery. In fact, each bottle came with a warning that, in retrospect, doubled as an inadvertent how-to:.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

28. “I would submit, sir, that you and your family are addicted to money.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

29. “The truth was, Librium and Valium were marketed using such a variety of gendered mid-century tropes – the neurotic singleton, the frazzled housewife, the joyless career woman, the menopausal shrew – that what Roche’s tranquilizers really seemed to offer was a quick fix for the problem of “being female.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

30. “Sounding a bit like Arthur Sackler when he dismissed the dangers of Valium, Romagosa asserted that fears of people becoming hooked on morphine had been overblown, because addiction “is a psychological malady” and only occurred when morphine was misused by “those who do not need it.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

31. “They “duped the FDA, saying OxyContin lasted twelve hours,” Moore said. “They lied about the addictive properties. And they did all this to grow the opioid market, to make it okay to jump in the water. Then some of these other companies, they saw that the water was warm. And they said, ‘Okay, we can jump in, too.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

32. “Often, companies will wait until the original patent has nearly run its course and then introduce some minor tweak to the product, thereby obtaining a new patent and effectively restarting the clock.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

33. “Roche offered a different interpretation: while it might be true that some patients appeared to be abusing Librium and Valium, these were people who were using the drug in a nontherapeutic manner. Some individuals just have addictive personalities and are prone to abuse any substance you make available to them. This attitude was typical in the pharmaceutical industry: it’s not the drugs that are bad; it’s the people who abuse them.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

34. “As for Curtis Wright, he had been giving some thought, lately, to leaving the federal government. After the approval for OxyContin went through, he resigned from the FDA. Initially, he joined a small pharmaceutical firm in Pennsylvania called Adolor. But he did not stay long. Barely a year later, he moved on, to a new position at Purdue Pharma, in Norwalk, with a first-year compensation package of nearly $400,000.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

35. “A 2016 study found that purchasing even a single meal with a value of $20 for a physician can be enough to change the way that he prescribes. And for all their lip service to the contrary, the Sacklers didn’t need studies to tell them this.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

36. “Purdue filed papers with the FDA, asking the agency to refuse to accept generic versions of the original formulation of OxyContin – the version the company had been selling all these years – on grounds that it was unsafe. The company said that it was voluntarily withdrawing the original formulation from the market for reasons “of safety.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

37. “You spend the first half of your career going after the bad guys and then the second half representing them.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

38. “They resented being cast as the villains in a drama, but it was their own stunted, stubborn blindness that made them so well suited to the role. They couldn’t change.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

39. “She complained that because of Purdue’s message about the drug being “good for whatever ails you,” OxyContin was “creeping into a whole population of people where it doesn’t belong.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

40. “Richard couldn’t even feign compassion. It seemed to Thompson that the general impression Richard was trying to convey, not just with his answers but with the tone of his voice and his body language, was that he was above all this.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

41. “OxyContin was, in his view, entirely beyond reproach – a magnificent gift that the Sacklers had bestowed upon humanity that was now being sullied by a nihilistic breed of hillbilly pill poppers.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

42. “The Sackler empire is a completely integrated operation,” Blair wrote. They could develop a drug, have it clinically tested, secure favorable reports from the doctors and hospitals with which they had connections, devise an advertising campaign in their agency, publish the clinical articles and the advertisements in their own medical journals, and use their public relations muscle to place articles in newspapers and magazines.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

43. “The truth is, she said, that she, Kathe, deserved credit for coming up with “the idea” for OxyContin. Her accusers were suggesting that OxyContin was the taproot of one of the most deadly public health crises in modern history, and Kathe Sackler was outing herself, proudly, as the taproot of OxyContin.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

44. “They had passed a point of no return. And as it happened, there was an inexpensive substitute for OxyContin that was cheaper and stronger and widely available: heroin.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

45. “It was laughable, he asserted, to suggest that a physician might be seduced by a glossy layout in a medical journal in the same manner that a housewife might be swayed by a slick ad in a magazine.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

46. “What I have given you is the most important thing a father can give,” Isaac told Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond. What he had given them, he said, was “a good name.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

47. “I am one of the most famous reformed junkies on the planet,” she told Joss’s nemesis, Page Six. “What is it about me that says to Joss Sackler, ‘I will sell out to you?”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

48. “No single individual did more to shape the character of medical advertising than the multi-talented Dr. Arthur Sackler.” It was Arthur, the citation continued, who brought “the full power of advertising and promotion to pharmaceutical marketing.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

49. “Arthur liked limbo. He thrived on it. He’d built a life around fuzzy boundaries, overlapping identities, conflicts of interest. Limbo was his element.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe

50. “Moral panics over drugs in America had tended to focus on street drugs and to play on fears about minority groups, immigrants, and illicit influences.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe