Eric Ambler Quotes

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.

War is a grim, cruel business, a business justified only as a means of sustaining the forces of good against those of evil.

If this isn’t good versus evil, what is?

Wars: You know how you start, but you never know how you end.

When you fight -- fight to win

It is the fact of life that a truth emerges out of a conflict between two wrongs.

The failure to readily identify the battle between good and evil is a nagging, ongoing, dangerous pattern that shows no sign of easing up any time soon.

I've always enjoyed bad guys throughout all movies.

Good and evil lay side by side.

Good and Evil are very hard to explain or understand. I'm sure that evil exists, but it is hard to isolate. Good and evil are intertwined and impossible to separate. They are not completely opposites and in fact are often one and the same.

There is much said about the wickedness of doing evil that good may come. Alas! there is such a thing as doing good that evil may come.

And he who must be a creator in good and evil: verily, he must be an annihilator first and demolish values.

Oh, dear Hazel.” Aphrodite folded her fan. “Such optimism, yet you have heartrending days ahead of you. Of course war is coming. Love and war always go together. They are the peaks of human emotion! Evil and good, beauty and ugliness.

A civilization built on dualism and war within and between persons, one that puts its most creative minds and its best engineers to sadistic work building more and more destructive weapons, is no civilization at all. It needs a radical transformation from the heart outwards. It needs to outgrow and outlaw war just as in the last century it outlawed slavery. The human race has outgrown war, but it hardly knows it yet.

Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide... I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you're fighting.

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.

Make no mistake about it: Operation Desert Storm truly was a victory of good over evil, of freedom over tyranny, of peace over war.

Those good at war aren't good at peace, and those good at peace aren't good at war.

There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.

In the vocabulary of certain radical theorists contradictions are given the status of some deadly disease to which their opponents alone can succumb. But contradictions are the very stuff of life. If there had been a little dash of contradiction among the Gadarene swine some of them might have been saved from drowning.

My brother, are war and battle evil? Necessary, however, is the evil; necessary are the envy and the distrust and the back-biting among the virtues.

War provides an outlet for every evil element in man's nature. It enfranchises cupidity and greed gives a charter to petty tyranny, glorifies cruelty and places in positions of power the vulgar and base.

Armel shrugged. "I suppose so, Brother, but why do creatures have to fight?" Demple picked Mudge up and placed him on his shoulder. "Because there's always good and bad in the land, and goodbeasts have to protect their friends an' families from evil ones who want nothing but to conquer an' destroy.