Quotes About Morality

What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.

About the cathouse: the notion that an accepted element in the social order is a whorehouse goes hand in hand with the woman on a pedestal.

Somewhere between the Yolo Causeway and Vallejo it occurred to me that during the course of any given week I met too many people who spoke favorably about bombing power stations.

You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing—beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code—what is "right" and what is "wrong," what is "good" and what "evil.

Watch: (1) You do something nasty to me. (2) I hate you. (3) You find it uncomfortable to be hated. (4) You think how nice it would be if I didn't hate you. (5) You decide I ought not to hate you because hate is bad. (6) Good people don't hate. (7) Because I hate you I am a bad person. (8) It is not what you did to me that makes me hate you, it is my own bad nature. I—not you—am the cause of my hating you.

Privileged groups, like everyone else, want to think well of themselves and to believe that they are acting generously and justly.

The Bishop was capable of anger, but he was not capable of hate.

A demon, if you prefer the term; although to be honest, the difference between god and a demon is really only a matter of perspective.

Polite contempt. The barbed and poisonous weapon of the righteous.

The battle of good and evil reduced to a fat woman standing in front of a chocolate shop, saying, Will I? Won't I? in pitiful indecision.

We're gods, not saints. Everyone lies. Everyone cheats. Everyone scores off everyone else.

We do not— interpret —God's laws to suit ourselves. Or the laws of our country

A devil doesn't act through evil, but through weakness...

Some actions are even baser than the people who commit them.

There was no denying that whores surrounded him. Not just the women on the flat screen, but the political whores who'd attended his meeting. He replayed his own conciliatory words and wondered whether he was one as well

Can you hate someone for what they have done, but still love them for whom they had been?

Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.

Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.

Power isn't about doing something terrible to someone who's weaker than you, Reiner. It's having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.

There were lies we told to save ourselves, and then there were lies we told to rescue others. What counted more, the mistruth, or the greater good?

There are so many things I can't believe. That people deserve what they get, both bad and good. That one day I'll live in a world where people are judged by what they do instead of who they are. That happy endings don't have contingencies and conditions.

I don't understand why it's a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.

She wanted him to tell her that when you love someone so hard and so fierce, it was all right to do things that you knew were wrong.

Add love, and all the lines between right and wrong were bound to disappear.