Cormac McCarthy on Knowledge

"Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them"

"I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble."

"Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."

"I've seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away."

"I know your kind, he said. What’s wrong with you is wrong all the way through you."

"A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with."

"How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of."

"You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from."

"I’ll tell you somethin, Sheriff. Nineteen is old enough to know that if you have got somethin that means the world to you it’s all that more likely it’ll get took away. Sixteen was, for that matter. I think about that"

"It's not about knowin where you are. It's about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. Or anybody's. You dont start over. That's what it's about. Every step you take is forever. You cant make it go away. None of it."

"Pale manchild were there last agonies? Were you in terror, did you know? Could you feel the claw that claimed you? And who is this fool kneeling over your bones, choked with bitterness? And what could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream."

"I aint got all that many regrets. I could imagine lots of things that you might think would make a man happier. I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it."

"They rode on. They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds."