Quotes About Morality

Every hero is someone's villain

Probably been sure he'd got the right god, the right king, the right cause. Everyone finds a way to make their side the right one, after all. Now, as he stumbled back trying to hold his neck together, he found it's not the righteous win, but them who strike first and strike hardest.

People like things that are simple. Black and white. Good and evil. They want to make a choice and tell themselves they were right. But as His Eminence is fond of saying, the real world is painted in greys. The truth is complicated, full of mixed emotions and blurred outcomes and each-way bets. The truth… is a hard sell.

Honour, eh? What the hell is that anyway? Every man thinks it's something different. You can't drink it. You can't fuck it. The more of it you have the less good it does you, and if you've got none at all you don't miss it.

Faith must be shaken from time to time, or it becomes rigid. An excuse for any outrage. I have come to believe that the righteous… should always have doubts.

Seemed being a better man might be harder work than he'd thought.

Once the killing starts, it rarely sticks to those who deserve it

What use are straight answers in a crooked world?

Honour, eh? What the hell is that anyway? Every man thinks it's something different. You can't drink it. You can't fuck it. The more of it you have the less good it does you, and if you've got none at all you don't miss it.' He shook his head. 'But some men think it's the best thing in the world.

Someone who'd starved in the camps, who'd lied her way into the hearts and beds of good people, who'd tricked and tortured to betray a cause she halfway believed in for the sake of one she didn't at all, might've felt a little bitter at seeing all this money wasted.

On the right side of history, maybe. Vick snorted. The thing about history is you don't know what the right side is till long afterwards, and by then it hardly matters. That's the sort o' thing you hear from folk who know they're on the wrong side.

Trouble with the good fight, I find… once

Codes of honour, I fear, aren't worth the paper they're not written on.

But being an arsehole is crime and punishment both.

Folk she'd known to be big on religion had tended to use it as an excuse for doing wrong rather'n a reason not to.

We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged.' Heinrich Heine

I did a good thing, and so, of course, there is a price to be paid.

War?' 'It's when a fight gets so big almost no one comes out of it well.

Downside was frowning at the Shanka corpses, weighing his axe and wondering where to start. "Never thought o' myself as a man who fills sacks with heads." "No one sets off in that direction," said Clover, puffing out his cheeks one more time. "But before you know it, there you bloody are.

Do you know what's worse than a villain? A villain who thinks he's a hero.

Trouble with the good fight, I find... once the fight starts, the good stops.

Conscience is an excuse not to do what needs doing.

La historia no es un relato de las batallas entre el bien y el mal, sino entre el bien de una persona y el de otra. El mal no es lo contrario del bien. Es como llamamos a la noción del bien que tiene otra persona cuando difiere de la nuestra.

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse." —Joseph Brodsky What Freedom Looks Like The point of the shovel bit into the ground with the sharp scrape of metal on earth.