George Bernard Shaw Quotes

I don't think good and evil are polarized.

Morality without a sense of paradox is mean.

My idea of what's good and bad and right and wrong is maybe greyer than most, and I like writing about that.

Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide... I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you're fighting.

Virtue that transgresses is but patched with sin; and sin that amends is but patched with virtue.

I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

Good and evil both increase at compound interest.

a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful.

There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning -- without altogether recognizing it beneath the disguise of ambiguous behavior which it assumes in his presence.

The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.

The real nature of an ethic is that it does not become an ethic unless and until it goes into action.

Wisdom is always connected to beauty. When you see someone acting by their principles, their wisdom makes them beautiful.

VIRTUES, n.pl. Certain abstentions.

If there's one value that is immutable, it's integrity or respect, for others and for yourself.

There is no such thing as a minor lapse of integrity

I had always thought that the 'good,' and the 'bad' and the 'violent' did not exist in any absolute, essential sense. It seemed to me interesting to demystify these adjectives in the setting of a Western. An assassin can display a sublime altruism while a good man can kill with total indifference.

You know how confusing the whole good-evil concept is for me.

Every one of us ... knows better than he practices, and recognizes a better law than he obeys.

Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act.

There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules

The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

Moralizing and morals are two entirely different things and are always found in entirely different people

Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.

There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.

Principles do not mainly influence even the principled; we talk on principle, but we act on interest.