James Wolk Quotes

A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified.

There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.

The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.

The ends do not justify the means. The means are the ends.

One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.

Morality is like a field of flowers beneath which the corpses are piled in a thousand layers. It is an evolved mechanism whereby the human organism proceeds through life sustained on every side by bonds of mutual interest.

I don't believe so much in good and evil.

The plea of necessity, that eternal argument of all conspirators.

Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world - and there clearly are - then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.

Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.

Greatness is not manifested by unlimited pragmatism, which places such a high premium on the end justifying any means and any methods.

All moral laws are merely statements that certain kinds of actions will have good effects.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

People want to know if I have a moral standpoint that they should be picking up on, and the truth is, I don't. I don't want people to think that I'm trying to tell them to feel a certain way. I think that's cheap filmmaking.

You can't do something that is morally vacuous or dysfunctional and then write it off saying, 'It wasn't my film, I was just doing a job in it.'

No doubt, corporate CEOs who lie to their shareholders and politicians who lie to their public know and believe intellectually that lying is immoral. Why then do they lie? They lie to others because they first lie to themselves.

It may not have the virtuous ring of the golden rule, but the maxim 'never say never' is one of the most important in ethics.

There is no right in acting.

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.

The struggle for morality never stays won. It's always in process.

Though many have tried, no one has ever yet explained away the decisive fact that science, which can do so much, cannot decide what it ought to do.

Enhanced interrogation is not to be considered lightly, but the use of enhanced interrogation techniques does not require moral people to abandon their beliefs. Rather, it is precisely during these difficult times that one's beliefs about life, justice and mercy become indispensible.

Every judgement of conscience, be it right or wrong, be it about things evil in themselves or morally indifferent, is obligatory, in such wise that he who acts against his conscience always sins.

It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.