Toni Morrison Quotes

I'm not an evil person. Nobody's really evil.

I feel it's in people's nature to want to stop evil and embrace the good.

To do no evil is good, to intend none better.

It's obviously a lot harder to try and be a good guy than it is to be a bad guy. The world is a fundamentally evil place, it seems like. So in order to be a good person, you have to fight temptation and vice.

I've never met an evil person ever.

I don't do anything bad.

And one of the elders of the city , said , speak to us of good and evil. And he answered : You are good in countless ways , and you are not evil when you are not good .

I'd always found goodness more interesting then evil, though I was aware this wasn't the most general view. To my mind, it took more work and more courage to be good, an opinion continually reinforced by my own shortcomings.

It is no easy task to be good.

You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong - only because cruelty is pleasant or useful to him, In other words, badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.

If you want to be good, all you've got to do is be good.

It's not enough not to be evil. We also actively try to be good.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

The eternal conflict of good and the best with bad and the worst is on.

Goodness is something that makes us serene and content; it is magnificent. Those who are not good are evil.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

I think that we all know what evil is. We have a sense of what's evil, and certainly killing innocent people is evil. We're less sure about what is good. There's sort of good, good enough, could be better - but absolute good is a little harder to define.

Piety is the most solid goodness, and the vilest of what is evil is vice.

A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains.

Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.

Being against evil doesn't make you good.

No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.

No man-made law will ever eliminate cruelty and evil from every human heart.

Of course I am not evil.