Arnold Bennett Quotes

It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.

Keep in mind, Eragon, that no one thinks himself a villain, and few make decisions they think are wrong. A person may dislike his choice, but he will stand by it because, even in the worst circumstances, he believes that it was the best option available to him at the time.

If you cannot endure to be thought in the wrong, you will begin to do terrible things to make the wrong appear right.

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.

We did what our people do all the time, we told ourselves something we did was right and we found a way to justify it, even though we knew it was wrong.

I think ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense.

Everything wrong I've ever done has always seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

When evil acts in the world it always manages to find instruments who believe that what they do is not evil but honorable.

The greatest bad guys, you understand where they're coming from. They believe they're doing the right thing. Sometimes it's for greed, sometimes it's for other reasons, but they are what they call the center of good. They always believe they're doing the right thing.

This is not the most right I've ever been.

There is a demand in these days for men who can make wrong appear right.

He [William Gladstone] made his conscience not his guide but his accomplice.

Even people that are evil believe what they're doing is good. I don't agree with those people, but it's about understanding that there are those kinds of points of view.

I think every villain basically thinks that he or she is doing something to make his world, or the world in general, a better place.

Every villain has their belief system that makes perfect sense to them.

The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit.

To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals.

I can't tell the difference between wrong and right, are you laughing at me?

You're trying to be tricky. What's morality?" "It's the difference between what's right and what you can rationalize." "Must be a human thing." "Exactly.

No man is defeated without some resentment which will be continued with obstinacy while he believes himself in the right, and asserted with bitterness, if even to his own conscience he is detected in the wrong.

Good taste is the excuse I've always given for leading such a bad life

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil", it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.

Strange that we all defend our wrongs with more vigor than we do our rights.

What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good.