Walter Lippmann Quotes

You think that you can judge what's good or evil from whether you enjoy doing it or not. You think that evil is what always appears in the form of a temptation, while good is what you never spontaneously want to do. I think this is all total rubbish, if you don't mind my saying so.

I have a private theory, Sir, that there are no heroes and no monsters in this world. Only children should be allowed to use these words

The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.

I'm not a great deep political thinker.

George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism.

We always want to find good and bad guys, and I don't believe in that.

Conservatives divide the world in terms of good and evil while liberals do it in terms of the rich and poor.

We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.

I don't believe that pure evil exists, personally.

If half an onion is black with rot, it is a rotten onion. A man is good or he is evil. (Melisandre of Asshai)

Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again.

If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will.

In a perfect world everything would be either black or white, right or wrong, and everyone would know the difference. But this isn't a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is.

When I see big movies that are only about good versus evil, and the good guy wins, I only can think we're in a far more complicated world than that. I frankly think that this binary philosophy is actually a dangerous way to look at the world.

People do things in the names of good, and in the name of ideals, but the world isn't that simple. So they end up doing things that aren't necessarily good. Even if they think they're doing the right thing, but when viewed from a different perspective they can look barbaric and crazy.

We are very wrong to think that some fault or other can exclude virtue, or to consider the alliance of good and evil as a monstrosity or an enigma.

If goodness can't come from bad things, it makes bad things unbearable.

In philosophy class I think we finally decided that 'good' is an infinitely recursive term - it can't be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it's better than bad, though why it's better to be good than bad depends on how you define good, and on and on.

If a context and a goal is defined I could say if it's good or bad. But overall I don't view things as good or bad. So I'm like a robot or computer in that sense. So maybe that's why people don't think they know me when they read my writing.

No one is entirely good or evil; that is what the Warrior thinks when he has a new opponent.

There is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners. The contemporary world, with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters, demands that we confront every form of polarization which would divide it into these two camps.

I used to think the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty. I’m still going through the motions.

Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality.

The statesman must think in terms of the national interest, conceived as power among other powers. The popular mind, unaware of the fine distinctions of the statesman's thinking, reasons more often than not in the simple moralistic and legalistic terms of absolute good and absolute evil.

...Do you see things in black and white, or are there shades of gray for you?" "I hope there's gray...Black and white make things easier, but only if you don't want to think.