Speaker For The Diodes - Post a comment

Apr. 2nd, 2014

05:24 am - QotD

It seems that attitudes toward criminals have changed substantially since I was a child. It may be that I am wrong, because I was largely sheltered from contact with those sorts of people until I met Laura, but it seems that, when I was young, one was a criminal, or one was an honest citizen, and the demarcation was well drawn. Today, most people break laws and don't think much of it, perhaps because of the odd things that have come to be illegal. But the result is that the line between law-abiding citizen and hardened criminal is much softer than it was.

[...] When I was much younger and much more naïve, I thought that the line between legal and illegal stayed close to the line between right and wrong. Well, either I was living an illusory life then, or everything has changed now, so that when the two lines intersect it seems only momentary, transitory, coincidental.

Or, more likely, it is because when I do what I must to survive, I am, technically, committing crimes; yet how can what I do be wrong, when it is only what I must do? Still, perhaps this is a justification that has been used by scoundrels ever since the class has existed; I do not know.

-- John Agyar, narrator and protagonist of Agyar by Steven Brust (1993, Tor / Tom Doherty Associates, Inc., New York, NY; ISBN 0-312-85178-2)

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