- 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.