Marie Lu Quotes

Choices of right or wrong are not presented to you in black and white. If they were, I'm sure most people would choose white.

Contemporary audiences are interested in watching characters navigate ethical challenges and moral dilemmas.

I know the difference between right and wrong, and I can tell good from bad. But I also know that the more difficult decisions come when we have to choose between good and better. The toughest calls of all are those we have to make between bad and worse.

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

But there are times in this harum-scarum world when figuring out the right thing to do is quite simple, but doing the right thing is simply impossible.

Sometimes there are good reasons to do bad things.

people do terrible things, sometimes, for the best reasons.

You got to wrestle with your conscience. You got to listen to people. It doesn't come so easy to me that this is right and that's wrong. It's never that simple.

It was better that a little blood should be shed that much blood should be saved. The blood that was shed was bad blood; the blood that was saved was good blood.

Unfortunately sometimes one can't do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.

If I have to remove one to save ten, I'll do it in a heartbeat. If I have to waterboard somebody to save a thousand people, I'll do it in a heartbeat.

All I can do is say I smell a rat. I don't know where it is or what kind of rat it is, but as an artist, I can express how. But I couldn't responsibly stand up and tell people which way to go, because then I'm just as guilty as the people who are telling everybody else what to do and where to go.

You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.

It is sometimes rational to do what is wrong, and sometimes irrational to do what is right

There is nothing more likely to drive a man mad, than the being unable to get rid of the idea of the distinction between right and wrong, and an obstinate, constitutional preference of the true to the agreeable.

The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.

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.

Compassion without wisdom is dangerous. It's what enables people to support the 'underdog,' even if the underdog is evil

We have a lot of villains in the world, all right? And the Catholic doctrine says turn the other cheek, the Christian doctrine. But if you turn the other cheek, you could be annihilated. So when is it justifiable to defend yourself and take aggressive action in that regard, like dropping drones on people?

I don't want ever to be a president who is comfortable and at ease with killing people.

I don't want my generals or my defense secretary or my national-security team to ever feel deploying weapons to kill people as routine or abstract, even if the targets are bad people.

Maybe today you could have shot anybody and get away with it. So there's many times, I could have killed people. Legally, I could have killed many people, especially working undercover.

Maybe sometimes we don't do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don't want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it's dangerous. We're more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right.

Is it wrong to kill something that wants to kill you?

I firmly believe that we're all good people, but sometimes it's hard to understand how to do good.