Maurice Druon Quotes

I wanted to play around with the format, really tear it to pieces and shake it up. For example, if Mitch saves someone from drowning, and that person then goes out and releases a virus that kills a million people. Imagine the moral implications of that.

He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.

Of course 'Hamlet' is a debate about the nature and morality of revenge and whether it is right to do something to assuage your angry feelings.

Even a believer in nonviolence has to say between two combatants which is less bad or whose cause is just.

Every act has both good and evil results. The best we can do is lean to the light.

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

Kill a man who needs killing, and sometimes others pay for it. The question is, was it worth doing it anyway? There's always a balance, you know. Good and evil. Light and Shadow. We would not be human if there wasn't a balance.

A sin takes on a new and real terror when there seems a chance that it is going to be found out.

There comes a moment in every life when a choice must be made between right and wrong, between good and evil, between light and darkness. These decisions are made in an instant, but with repercussions that last a lifetime.

There's no free will," says the philosopher; "To hang is most unjust." "There is no free will," assents the officer; "We hang because we must.

So you would rather suffer an injustice than do an injustice?

There is no cosmic scale on which you can weigh your actions; you learn too late what choices ruin the fragile balance.

Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return to plague the inventor.

The law of Karma is the law of causation.

No effect occurs without cause, and no cause occurs without effect. No unjust action goes without penalty, and no action or thought flows unnoticed throughout the universe.

With a great moral issue involved, neutrality does not serve righteousness; for to be neutral between right and wrong is to serve wrong.

In the end ... success or failure will come down to an ethical decision, one on which those now living will be judged for generations to come.

He who wrongs the innocent must bear the fruit of his act, like dust flung against the wind.

If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment-as well as the prison.

I wish my countrymen to consider that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the leastact of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it. A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length even become the laughing-stock of the world.

To spare the guilty is to injure the innocent.

They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others.Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death.

Such is the moral construction of the world that no national crime passes unpunished in the long run... Were present oppressors to reflect on the same truth, they would spare to their own countries the penalties on their present wrongs which will be inflicted on them in future times. The seeds of hatred and revenge which they sow with a large hand will not fail to produce their fruits in time. Like their brother robbers on the highway, they suppose the escape of the moment a final escape and deem infamy and future risk countervailed by present gain.

There's always got to be room for what you might call benign corruption. Nobody blames a man who steals food to feed his starving children, but on the other hand, somebody who picks up a badge and takes an oath to serve and protect; we do expect a certain level of essential honesty.