Benjamin Franklin Quotes

There is no rational creature which is not capable both of good and evil

Dangerous thing, giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil. And the capacity to make the wrong choice more often than not.

The issues of the choice between right and wrong has to be an ongoing concern for everybody, at every age. There is no magical point in a human life when anyone is or becomes immune to the second-by-second choice to do right instead of wrong.

Inability to tell good from evil is the greatest worry of man's life.

Wickedness is always easier than virtue; for it takes the short cut to everything.

I suspect that here theists and atheists would agree: Human beings have within them the ability to choose evil or good. We wake up each day facing the age-old struggle of good and evil. In some situations, mental illness clouds our judgment.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

The more...we consider man to be free, the less we can say, that he can neglect to use reason, or choose evil in preference to good

Whether you do something or decide to do nothing, either way, you are making a moral choice. And I hope people make the right one.

God uses the opposite situation of each fruit to allow us a choice. You can't claim to be good if you have never been tempted to be bad.

It was not that Adam ate the apple for the apple's sake, but because it was forbidden. It would have been better for us-oh infinitely better for us-if the serpent had been forbidden.

Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.

All human beings search for either reasons to be good, or excuses to be bad.

As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of good and evil?

It is not the temptations you have, but the decision you make about them that counts.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

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

That free will was demonstrated in the placing of temptation before man with the command not to eat of the fruit of the tree which would give him a knowledge of good and evil, with the disturbing moral conflict to which that awareness would give rise.

The act of willing this or that, of choosing among various courses of conduct, is central in the realm of ethics.

The power of choosing good and evil is within the reach of all.

Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.

While early childhood experiences may impel, they do not compel. In the end, evil is a matter of choice.

Were there no desire there would be no virtue, and because one man desires what another does not, who shall say whether the child of his desire be Vice or Virtue?