Leonard Peltier Quotes

Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.

We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent.

Although a man has so well purged his mind that nothing can trouble or deceive him any more, yet he reached his present innocence through sin.

Vice, like virtue, Grows in small steps, and no true innocence Can ever fall at once to deepest guilt.

An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.

It's my view that children are violent, dirty, corrupt anarchists. Just adults-in-waiting, basically.

'Good Times' is a story about the loss of innocence, how adults are responsible for their actions but children aren't.

God never meant that people were to wear clothes. He meant we were to be nude. But we were in a state of innocence. Then sin came into the human race and became a blood poisoning.

Everyone is born sincere and die deceivers.

We are not angels. Nor are we the devils you have made us out to be.

Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices, there are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.

Commit the oldest sins the newest kind of ways.

We are all afflicted by original sin; people succumbing to temptations to do and to be.

Had laws not been, we never had been blam'd; For not to know we sinn'd is innocence.

People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.

O who is more to blame: He who sins for pay - Or he who pays for sin?

Sins are timeless. Sins are an everyday reality for every one. Sin has been in existence since the beginning of man, since Adam and Eve. It will always be pertinent.

...And in freedom, most people find sin.

No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

The story of the Fall always fascinates me as a play ground, but I cannot find any profound meaning in it, because of my 'liberal' view of human nature: I cannot believe in a state of original innocence, still less in a profound meaning in it, and I am always minimising the conception and the extent of Sin and the sinfulness of sex.

We ourselves, though we're guilty of every sin, are not just a work of God: we're image. Yet we have cut ourselves off from our Creator in both soul and body. Did we get eyes to serve lust, the tongue to speak evil, ears to hear evil, a throat for gluttony, a stomach to be gluttony's ally, hands to do violence, genitals for unchaste excesses, feet for an erring life? Was the soul put in the body to think up traps, fraud, and injustice? I don't think so.

It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be) "There is always something." And I said, "Maybe not on the Judge." And he said, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.