All Quotes

", the end of the Viking world with a terrible winter that covered the Earth in ice, when vile crimes were rampant and all humanity lost. I could see how someone impressionable might get it into their head that we were at the end of time."

"The flesh of fallen angels."

", , , , , , , Hela... Blood given to you all... He was after that old - your soul for power and fortune, just sign on the dotted line with your blood."

"After the end of the world had become a cliché. But who was I to talk, a brooding underdog avenger alone against an empire of evil, out to right a grave injustice. Everything was subjective. There were only personal apocalypses. Nothing is a cliché when it's happening to you."

"Secrets... living under the skin of reality. I've seen it, the corruption of flesh! I'm the wolf! Yeah! I am the wolf! It's close. It's coming. You have come. The witness to the end of time. It's now! I will rise to her side! I don't need the words! I'm beyond the words!"

"I had known there'd have to be a catch in it somewhere, and this one was the Empire State Building of catches. [...] Lupino was pumped up and dying to go 15 rounds with a mutant alligator."

"The nightmare was always the same. Violent shapes moving in darkness, old and ugly. The killer's mad laughter was a riddle filled with wicked innuendo. Somewhere the baby was crying."

"Shoot 'em fulla holes, blow 'em to bits, vaporize 'em, disintegrate 'em, no matter whatchu do, they'll still be back, good as new."

"None of us was a saint."

"The numbing cold of the broken night had followed me in. Upstairs the trio tangoed down the manor halls to the silent rhythm of their murderous hearts, the blood of their victims rust on their lips."

"Punchinello was a pushover. The moment I stepped into the room he folded like a deuce before a royal flush."

"Take me to Cold Steel."

"I was in a graphic novel. Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of."

"I was in a computer game. Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of."

"Staggering on the mill roof in ice and snow and wild wind, I was a ninja. My kung fu was strong. I wasn't kidding anyone. At best, I was Superman on kryptonite, about to fall through a skylight, down to where it was all going down."

"I was close enough to hear the secrets just beyond the next doorway."

"I had taken on the role of the mythic detective: Bogart as Marlowe, or as going after the Maltese Falcon, to unravel all the mysteries. Following a path of clues to that final revelation, even if it would take me down to the cold, cavernous depths of a grave."

"Project . V for V for Valhalla. All of a sudden it read like a crackpot conspiracy theory."

"I hadn't slept in a million years."

"When the darkness fell, New York City became something else, any old Sinatra song notwithstanding. Bad things happened in the night, on the streets of that other city. Noir York City."

"I had dreamed of revenge. Those dreams were always nightmares, of coming close and then failing. Now I was close. I had a name to guide me. Nicole Horne. I had nothing to lose."

"Mine wasn't the most original approach to the problem, it wasn't as if it hadn't all been done before-- An eye for an eye, the first principle of revenge, old as dirt, still going strong. The cardinal rule in going after someone with an intention to kill was not to make it personal, which it almost always ended up being anyway."

"Valkyr had been meant to be a white-winged maiden who would lift you to a warrior's heaven. But it had turned out to be a one-way demon ride to hell. The devil was in the drug. I knew. I had met him."

"It's ridiculous you've made it this far."

"No begging, no bribes. She knew better. Honor among killers; we who are about to die. Both of us knew how this would end: in pain and suffering."

"They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark to everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the trigger. And then it was all over. The storm seemed to lose its frenzy. The ragged clouds gave way to the stars above. A bit closer to heaven."

"In the midst of this American society, so well policed, so sententious, so charitable, a cold selfishness and complete insensibility prevails when it is a question of the natives of the country. The Americans of the United States do not let their dogs hunt the Indians as do the Spaniards in Mexico, but at the bottom it is the same pitiless feeling which here, as everywhere else, animates the European race. This world here belongs to us, they tell themselves every day: the Indian race is destined for final destruction which one cannot prevent and which it is not desirable to delay. Heaven has not made them to become civilised; it is necessary that they die. Besides I do not want to get mixed up in it. I will not do anything against them: I will limit myself to providing everything that will hasten their ruin. In time I will have their lands and will be innocent of their death. Satisfied with his reasoning, the American goes to church where he hears the minister of the gospel repeat every day that all men are brothers, and that the Eternal Being who has made them all in like image, has given them all the duty to help one another."

"Men sometimes submit to shame, to tyranny, to conquest, but they never long suffer anarchy. There is no people so barbarous that they escape this general law of humanity"

"Born under another sky, placed in the middle of an always-moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which sweeps along everything that surrounds him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything; he grows accustomed to naught but change, and concludes by viewing it as the natural state of man; he feels a need for it; even more, he loves it: for instability, instead of occurring to him in the form of disasters, seems to give birth to nothing around him but wonders..."

"As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?"

"The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections."

"So many of my thoughts and feelings are shared by the English that England has turned into a second native land of the mind for me."

"The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction."

"Step back in time; look closely at the child in the very arms of his mother; see the external world reflected for the first time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding; study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen to the first words which arouse within him the slumbering power of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to undergo; only then will you comprehend the source of his prejudices, the habits, and the passions which are to rule his life. The entire man, so to speak, comes fully formed in the wrappings of his cradle."

"The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through."

"I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where the profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property."

"There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom."

"Furthermore, when citizens are all almost equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the aggressions of power."

"The hatred that men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become fewer and less considerable, so that democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when they have least fuel. I have already given the reason for this phenomenon. When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes. Hence it is natural that the love of equality should constantly increase together with equality itself, and that it should grow by what it feeds on."

""The will of the nation" is one of those expressions which have been most profusely abused by the wily and the despotic of every age."

"The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it."

"With much care and skill power has been broken into fragments in the American township, so that the maximum possible number of people have some concern with public affairs."

"The New Englander is attached to his township because it is strong and independent; he has an interest in it because he shares in its management; he loves it because he has no reason to complain of his lot; he invests his ambition and his future in it; in the restricted sphere within his scope, he learns to rule society; he gets to know those formalities without which freedom can advance only through revolutions, and becoming imbued with their spirit, develops a taste for order, understands the harmony of powers, and in the end accumulates clear, practical ideas about the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights."

"Useful undertakings which require sustained attention and vigorous precision in order to succeed often end up by being abandoned, for, in America, as elsewhere, the people move forward by sudden impulses and short-lived efforts."

"Pour recueillir les biens inestimables qu'assure la liberté de la presse, il faut savoir se soumettre aux maux inévitables qu'elle fait naître."

"The power of the periodical press is second only to that of the people."

"In countries where associations are free, secret societies are unknown. In America there are factions, but no conspiracies."

"A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it."

"In America, conscription is unknown; men are enlisted for payment. Compulsory recruitment is so alien to the ideas and so foreign to the customs of the people of the United States that I doubt whether they would ever dare to introduce it into their law."

"The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults."