Terry Pratchett Quotes

Good or bad is what we tend to want to affix to people, but we're all complicated.

I've learned a lot about good and evil. They are not always what they appear to be.

No human being in history was all good or all bad, or all black or all white.

I don't think anybody's all good or all bad.

We are not angels. Nor are we the devils you have made us out to be.

Men are not altogether bad or altogether good.

There are the good and bad and every morrally ambiguous shade in between.

Nobody is all good or bad.

[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.

I do see the good in people, but I also see the bad --- I see it in myself. I know what I'm capable of. Good and bad. It's very imnportant that we make that clear. Just because I often find a way around the darkness doesn't mean tjat I don't know it's there. (Bono)

Good people can do terrible things, and that's what life is all about, the complexities and grey areas. And often characters aren't written that way in movies, especially characters for women. So you end up being either one thing or the other.

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.

There is no such thing as pure good or pure evil, least of all in people.

a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful.

There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere in between.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

All of the films I have made, that I have chosen to make, are all about the thin line between good and evil. And also the thin line that exists in each and every one of us. That's what my films are about.

If you start out looking at somebody, wondering whether he's good or bad, I think you're starting out in the wrong direction. I think we're all good and we're all bad.

Human beings are good, they have shadow, every single one of us has redeeming qualities and every single one of us has qualities that people can hold against us. That’s what makes us human.

Everything in life is gray, you know.

I purposefully try to make films in that grey area, where things are morally ambiguous. It's like life: good people do horrible things, and bad people do good things, and there's beauty in horror and horror in beauty.

In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.

The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.

There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white.