Top 40 Stephen L. Carter Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We live today in a world in which nobody believes choices should have consequences. But may I tell you the great secret that our culture seeks to deny? You cannot escape the consequences of your choices. Time runs in only one direction.”

— Stephen L. Carter

2. “In our sensible zeal to keep religion from dominating our politics, we have created a political and legal culture that presses the religiously faithful to be other than themselves, to act publicly, and sometimes privately as well, as though their faith does not matter to them.”

— Stephen L. Carter

3. “One sees a trend in our political and legal cultures toward treating religious beliefs as arbitrary and unimportant, a trend supported by a rhetoric that implies that there is something wrong with religious devotion.”

— Stephen L. Carter

4. “On the opening day of law school at Yale, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.”

— Stephen L. Carter

5. “True love is not the helpless desire to possess the cherished object of one’s fervent affection; true love is the disciplined generosity we require of ourselves for the sake of another when we would rather be selfish; that, at least, is how I have taught myself to love my wife.”

— Stephen L. Carter

6. “Richard John Neuhaus, in his well-known book The Naked Public Square, tells us that in America, the public square has become openly hostile to religion.”

— Stephen L. Carter

7. “When you shoot someone who is fleeing, it’s not self-defense. It’s an execution.”

— Stephen L. Carter

8. “Teasing out the way the world might look through another’s eyes is what makes the creative process so fascinating and enjoyable.”

— Stephen L. Carter

9. “Love is a gift we deliver when we would rather not.”

— Stephen L. Carter

10. “Never act surprised in a courtroom.”

— Stephen L. Carter

11. “More than 20 years on, sustained competition, informed customers and the rapid growth of new technology provide the necessary environment for substantial deregulation.”

— Stephen L. Carter

12. “If you’re fascinated by America, you’ll be fascinated by family.”

— Stephen L. Carter

13. “In contemporary American culture, the religions are more and more treated as just passing beliefs – almost as fads – rather than as the fundaments upon which the devout build their lives.”

— Stephen L. Carter

14. “I think that black fiction authors have to work very hard to avoid being typed as seeking only a black audience.”

— Stephen L. Carter

15. “To be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box. On the box is a label, not of my own choosing.”

— Stephen L. Carter

16. “Lots of white people think black people are stupid. They are stupid themselves for thinking so, but regulation will not make them smarter.”

— Stephen L. Carter

17. “So many people of liberal persuasion value their own progressive opinions more than they value the people they hold those opinions about.”

— Stephen L. Carter

18. “I bristle again. I have never liked being called clever, especially by residents of the paler nation. It never quite means the same thing as intelligent or even bright, but carries instead an intimation of a low animal cunning. Perhaps the semiotician in me overreacts in assuming that conversations are racially charged; but so many conversations are.”

— Stephen L. Carter

19. “We often ask our citizens to split their public and private selves, telling them in effect that it is fine to be religious in private, but there is something askew when those private beliefs become the basis for public action.”

— Stephen L. Carter

20. “In a crisis, time was always the enemy.”

— Stephen L. Carter

21. “The victors always think they are righteous. But then, they always seem to start a mighty unrighteous squabbling over the spoils.”

— Stephen L. Carter

22. “Rumors chase the dead like flies, and we follow them with our prim noses. None of us are gossips, but we love listening to those who are.”

— Stephen L. Carter

23. “Rumor is rarely more interesting than fact, but it is always more readily available.”

— Stephen L. Carter

24. “Every conflict plagues the peace that follows it.”

— Stephen L. Carter

25. “This trivializing rhetoric runs the subtle but unmistakable message: pray if you like, worship if you must, but whatever you do, do not on any account take your religion seriously.”

— Stephen L. Carter

26. “I think of my novels as entertainments.”

— Stephen L. Carter

27. “We do not credit to the ideal of religious freedom when we talk as though religious belief is something of which public-spirited adults should be ashamed.”

— Stephen L. Carter

28. “There is much depressing evidence that the religious voice is required to stay out of the public square only when it is pressed in a conservative cause.”

— Stephen L. Carter

29. “Nastiness devalues the speaker as well because the unwillingness to restrain the urge marks the speaker as less civilized, more animal-like.”

— Stephen L. Carter

30. “In real life there are indeed black people who have been in the middle class for generations, but in entertainment it’s as if they don’t exist.”

— Stephen L. Carter

31. “The very aspect of religions that many of their critics most fear – that the religiously devout, in the name of their faith, take positions that differ from approved state policy – is one of their strengths.”

— Stephen L. Carter

32. “Even in 2012, if there’s a black character in the movies or on television that’s a professional, if we even hear about their backgrounds they’re always ’up from the streets.”

— Stephen L. Carter

33. “I find it hard to think of myself as selling books. I don’t even have a Web site. I want to sit and write, not sell.”

— Stephen L. Carter

34. “So much emotion goes into writing fiction.”

— Stephen L. Carter

35. “Coming from a business family, she shied away from abstractions.”

— Stephen L. Carter

36. “Better to wait actively than passively.”

— Stephen L. Carter

37. “Size and elaboration were often mistaken for importance.”

— Stephen L. Carter

38. “He was vain and tended to surround himself with intellectual and moral pygmies.”

— Stephen L. Carter

39. “The only way to prove his willingness to wait would be to wait.”

— Stephen L. Carter

40. “Our sense of history has grown dangerously thin, and our sense of proportion with it.”

— Stephen L. Carter

41. “Jonathan had been around Washington long enough to know that no offer was exactly what it seemed.”

— Stephen L. Carter

42. “He was the sort of man who only wanted to be told what he already assumed was true.”

— Stephen L. Carter