You could not bribe honest people, but bad people would accept bribery.

The sun glistened on a drop of water as it fell from his hand to his knee. David wiped it off, but it left no tidemark: there was no more dirt to rub away. He took a deep breath and shivered. He was David. Everything else was washed away, the camp, its smell, its touch--and now he was David, his own master, free--free as long as he could remain so.

Johannes had once said that violence and cruelty were just a stupid person's way of making himself felt, because it was easer to use your hands to strike a blow than to use your brain to find a logical and just solution to the problem.

Joy passed, but happiness never completely disappeared; a touch of it would always remain to remind one it had been there. It was happiness that made one smile, then.

There's always something when you're at fault, too, and that fault you must discover and learn to recognize and take the consequences of it.

Never let me hear you say it's someone else's fault. It often is, but you must never shirk your own responsibility ... You can't change others, but you can do something about a fault in yourself.

And it was most important to do what one knew was right, for otherwise the day might come when one could no longer tell the difference between right and wrong.