Quotes About Morality

This is the thing about good and evil. They aren't so far apart—and they often start from the same valiant place of wanting something to be different.

We always have a choice. That's what Grady said too. What does that even mean? That there is a right thing to do and there is a wrong thing to do. Simple. Judgmental. And if you are the person someone is asking that question about, you have chosen wrong—as if the world is divided between the people who have never made a big mistake. And the people who have.

This is the thing about good and evil. They aren't so far apart—and they often start from the same valiant

Growing up, one realizes how many things one cannot wish for, the things that are forbidden, sinful. Indecent. But what is decent? To deny everything that you really want?

Laura said faintly, 'I thought God takes care of us.' 'He does,' Pa said, 'so far as we do what's right. And He gives us a conscience and brains to know what's right. But He leaves it to us to do as we please. That's the difference between us and everything else in creation.

Well, Caroline, it's pleasant to be with a crowd of people all trying to do the right thing, same as we are.

We live in sexually interesting times, meaning a culture which manages to be simultaneously hypersexualized and to retain its Puritan underpinnings, in precisely equal proportions.

But you were a goody-goody, you said.' 'Even goody-goodies think about such things. In fact, I would say that's what defines us. We're always thinking about the things we don't dare do, figuring out where the lines are drawn, so we can go right up to the edge of things, then plead innocence on the ground of a technicality.

Compounds like wedding cake, suet plum-puddings, and rich turtle soup, are masses of indigestible material, which should never find their way to any Christian table (Shapiro citing Mary Peabody Mann, Christianity in the Kitchen).

Later, she also saw that innocence need be nothing of the kind, and that conventional morality might have its own impurity.

I try to be a good cop. I try to be a good little soldier and follow orders up to a point. But in the end I'm not really a cop, or a soldier. I am a legally sanctioned murderer. I am the Executioner.

I worry that when you start quoting Machiavelli to justify your actions, you have ceased to be one of the good guys. No, quoting Nietzsche does that. Machiavelli is just cool.

Sometimes good and evil aren't so much opposites as two sides of a coin. You toss it one way and it looks good, another way and it's evil, sometimes it just depends on which end of the gun you're on.

The second you stop questioning yourself is the second that you become the monster. -Merry

I used to think I knew what was right and what was wrong, and who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are. Then the world got very gray, and I didn't know anything for a long time

Sometimes you deal with the devil not because you want to, but because if you don't, someone else will.

Give a truly good person power, and they're still a good person. Give a bad person power, and they're still a bad person. The question is always about the person in between. The one that isn't evil, or good, but just ordinary. You don't always know what an ordinary person is like on the inside.

There are some things more important than physical survival. You gotta be able to look at yourself in the mirror.

When God ignores you, the devil starts looking good.

We aren't the good guys, Anita. We're the necessary guys. -Edward

Very few people see their own actions as truly evil,... It is left to their victims to decide what is evil and what is not.

If they cheat, can I shoot them?

I worry that when you start quoting Machiavelli to justify your actions, you have ceased to be one of the good guys.

I looked up at Ellen and her not-glowing pentagram. Harm none is the rule, Ellen: bad witch, no cookie.