Lincoln's line, which Neville quotes in about four lectures and which is the nearest thing in the corpus to a civic duty. He produces it at the Metropolitan Opera box office, where he has just stopped a man defrauding a teller of sixteen dollars, and the comment he attaches is unusually plain about himself: I have never once felt like being a coward - I'd rather die in the attempt to be what I would call the decent person than to be a coward by being silent when it's so obvious the man is trying to steal. It matters because it sits beside the doctrine of states, which is the reverse argument: the man is not a thief, he is only in the state of a thief, and no one is to be condemned. Neville holds both at once and does not reconcile them - he refuses to condemn the man and refuses to be silent about what the man is doing, and the protest is made in the same breath as the forgiveness. The verse he ends that passage with is Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.