Have Gun - Will Travel (TV Series)

A Matter of Ethics (1957)

Richard Boone: Paladin

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Quotes 

• Sheriff Swink : [Discussing the likelihood of a lynch mob]  With the whole town on the other side, I don't figure we'll come out on top.

  Paladin : As the poet Browning wrote, 'Tis not what man does that exalts him, but what man would do. And we three would do right.

  Sheriff Swink : Maybe that poet don't mind failing, but me, when I put my hand to a thing I like to know it's gonna be done.

  Paladin : Man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? That's Browning again.

• Amy Bender : Who are you?

  Paladin : My name is Paladin.

  Sheriff Swink : Holgate hired him to see he ain't lynched.

  Amy Bender : So the gunfighters are all for law and order... if the price is right.

  Paladin : You don't buy law and order, Miss Bender - you fght for it.

  Max Bender : Once you have it, you don't throw it away.

  Paladin : Your father knows how hard law is to come by.

  Amy Bender : All this talk won't change the writing on my brother's tombstone.

• Fred Coombs : She was always such a nice, quiet girl. I never suspected there was a streak of pure meanness under it all.

  Paladin : Meanness, Mr. Coombs? Hardly. Amy Bender hates and with good cause. It's frustrating for a woman to hate like this. She can't strap on a gun and settle this affair with her own two hands.

• Amy Bender : I don't want anyone hurt - except Holgate.

  Paladin : That's the trouble with a lynching, Miss Bender. You can't have it ordered up all neat and dainty like a yard of Flemish lace. It's something that cowards get whiskeyed up and mumble over, winding up with screams in the gutters of a dark night.

• Max Bender : Well, I hope this is a just verdict.

  Paladin : It will be. After the trial Holgate will climb on a horse. He'll fall off that horse while riding under a tree. His feet won't touch the ground, but the fall will break his neck all the same.

• Drummer McHeath : Give me a shotgun, Amy. Double blast in the belly ought to cut a man in half.

  Paladin : That man wouldn't be any deader than one with a 45 slug between his eyes.

  Drummer McHeath : You're a big man with a gun, ain't you.

  Paladin : And you're a big man with a crowd.

  Drummer McHeath : I don't need no crowd. And I don't need no gun.