Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

Our actions are neither so good nor so evil as our impulses.

Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.

The absence of vices adds so little to the sum of one's virtues.

What we take for virtue is often nothing but an assemblage of different actions, and of different interests, that fortune or our industry knows how to arrange.

There will never be a perfectly good or bad world, because the very idea is a contradiction in terms.

Good and evil lie close together. Seek no artistic unity in character.

A man's intentions should be allowed in some respects to plead for his actions.

Life is complex. You don't have any person who is nice from the beginning until the end. You don't always have the notion of redemption. The bad people don't always pay.

I don't think most people are all heroic or all villainous, so I find ambiguity of motivations to be a natural human condition.

I'll tell you, there's no goodies and baddies in the world, there's just people with intentions that sometimes clash.

I don't believe in bad and good, I believe we are all a mix of both.

I know myself - I cannot just play a cliche. It has to be a character; it has to be written with the complexity of the human being behind. Could be bad, could be good, could be someone we would hate, but still, I need a reason for that influence, and I need to understand why.

A man is not good or bad for one action.

I've always believed in people's capacity for goodness. I still believe that people are good. What I'm not so trusting about anymore is their relationship to their own goodness.

Because impudence is a vice, it does not follow that modesty is a virtue; it is built upon shame, a passion in our nature, and may be either good or bad according to the actions performed from that motive.

The thing is, I never see my characters as psychopaths. I see them as really crippled victims who just happen to do bad things. And I never see them as bad guys; I see them as darker characters. I never see anything as good or bad; it's more light or dark, and the in-between is the grey.

There are the good and bad and every morrally ambiguous shade in between.

I'm no angel, but I'm no monster, either.

I went looking for embodiments of pure evil, but found ordinary people.

You can't play a bad person; you can only be a person who does bad things for the right reasons.

I don't know if I've ever met anyone that's purely good or purely evil myself. I think most of us live with some varying degrees between the two.

Most people aren't good or bad. They're naive.

We've lost our sense of ethics; we live in a world of small-mindedness, of gratification without happiness and actions without meaning.

In ethics, prudence is not an important virtue, but in the world it is almost everything.

The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.