Quotes About Ethics

I can be a teddy bear, but more people tend to see me as the other side of the coin, and that has to do with casting, more Iago than Hamlet. But I don't play villains; I play people doing the right thing for the circumstances and time.

I'm not sure why I'm so drawn to heroes who do bad things and to villains who think they're the good guys, but I do find that moral ambiguity and conflict makes for great characters.

There are some characters in 'The Names' who are very much heroes and others who can only be called villains. But generally, as we get to know them, we see most of the characters are, or at least become, quite nuanced.

It feels bad to play a bad guy. I did George W. Bush for years, and I hated him. But you have to give full voice to the villains. You have to have really convincing villains, or it's not worth anything as drama or comedy.

Unalloyed heroes and unalloyed villains make me suspicious.

To me, the more interesting villains are the ones you can, in some sense, relate to or sympathize with at times. Maybe you sympathize with them one moment; the next moment, they do something truly atrocious, and you feel bad you ever sympathized with them in the first place.

I don't think villains think they are villains.

I always tried to play the bad guys as guys who didn't know they were bad guys. There are villains we run into all the time, but they don't think they are doing anything wrong. If they do, they think they are cunning and smart. When people break laws and ethical rules, they justify it in their own terms.

You go back to look over the body of my work, and there are no archetypal villains in my books.

Villains have to be passionate enough to say to themselves, 'I will do anything.' It's a certain type of personality that in life, for me, is not the way I live. Because you can't live in a society that way.

I only help the superheroes, I don't help the villains.

Every character, before they are heroes or villains, they are human beings.

It was important to me that my heroes not be all good and my villains not be all bad.

I am not necessarily my clients. I will seek to defend them, to vindicate their rights but that doesn't mean that I necessarily think that what they did was proper.

For his own vindictive purposes, Jeffrey Sterling carelessly disclosed extremely valuable, highly classified information that he had taken an oath to keep secret.

I just think you would never kill and cut up a human to wear so why do it to animals? I just think it's horrible, I would never wear fur, although I guess if it was a really vintage piece you might just get away with it.

If there is anything more frightening than the threat of global nuclear war, it is the certainty that humans not only stand on the verge of producing new life forms but may soon be able to tinker with them as if they were vintage convertibles or bonsai trees.

Words without deeds violates the moral and legal obligation we have under the genocide convention but, more importantly, violates our sense of right and wrong and the standards we have as human beings about looking to care for one another.

I don't want to do anything that violates my own personal code of ethics and morals.

For a member to say, 'I'm a lame duck' violates political science 101.

You do not have to be convicted or even charged of a crime to be able to demonstrate that you've violated a personal conduct policy, and reflect poorly not only on themselves, but all of their teammates, every NFL player in the league, and everyone associated with the NFL.

Just because people are in authority, if it doesn't seem right, don't do it. If it violates your own principles, don't do it.

Reasoning based on cost has been strenuously resisted; it violated the Hippocratic Oath, was associated with rationing, and derided as putting a price on life... Indeed, many physicians were willing to lie to get patients what they needed from insurance companies that were trying to hold down costs.

Inventing sources is not a crime in and of itself, although it certainly violates every code of journalistic ethics known to man. A criminal fraud case would require that the reporter's deceit had been malicious and resulted in financial gain.