Karl Popper Quotes

At the same time it offered the hope, as it still does, that improved understanding could better the lot of mankind. For me, growing up in the 1930s, the two motivations powerfully reinforced each other.

Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to make the world a better place.

People are strange, but more than that, they're good. They're good first, then strange.

Nobody's all good or bad, and nobody's all light or dark. Every human being has so many different aspects and facets to them. And there can be something noble and something really dark and dangerous going on in a person all at the same time.

No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature, but he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies.

If I were God, I would just be up there scratching my head, thinking, 'What the hell am I supposed to do with this?' For everyone helping an old lady across the street, there's someone else bludgeoning a person to death. And sometimes they're the same. How can He separate us all out?

Life is not better and more moral than it was in the '50s. It's just the same.

I'm interested in people's darker side, the ones that aren't easy and well balanced. The cracks.

One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions - there's all this contradictory information inside a human personality.

I work very hard at creating complex characters, a mix of positives and negatives. They are all flawed. I believe flaws are almost universal, and they help us understand, sympathise and, paradoxically, feel closer to such characters.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

'Lucky' is for laughs, and there's really nothing funny that I'm doing on 'Dexter.' I think more than anything, both comment on the fact that anybody is capable of anything. Just because they are the shy guy in the corner doesn't mean that they are a harmless little bunny.

I do believe as human beings we are a great mass of contradictions.

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.

My satisfaction comes from my commitment to advancing a better world.

There's a duality in every man and every woman.

It always feels good to be a part of something you think could actually impact human beings.

It's very true that you can be both selfless and selfish at the same time. What we tend towards, particularly in filmmaking, is this binary sort of, 'This is a good guy, this is a bad guy.' And I quite like the fact that life is a bit more complex than that.

What I love about the Don Draper character is that he's so real and filled with all these contradictions.

It's the murkiness of humanity that I find endlessly fascinating.

People are three-dimensional. They're not good or bad. They're not righteous or unrighteous. They are a million different things.

[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.

Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.

We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice. Where is the skillful swordsman who can give clean wounds, and not rip up his work with the other edge?