Henry Adams 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.

People don't necessarily do evil deeds because they want to; people happen to do something with horrible consequences even if they meant to be kind.

Right and wrong becomes more difficult for each of us as we grow older, because the older we get the more we know personally about our own human frailties.

Invite characters of surprising and moral character, or at least those who grapple with what is right or those who make decisions that shock.

I always end up taking people that are morally ambiguous.

The idea that we cause harm by doing what we perceive to be the right thing, that's another theme that interests me. Because most people don't intend to cause harm, they cause harm by doing the right thing - in their mind.

It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.

Good people do bad things.

I don't think there's a morally perfect way to do anything in life, but I'm not a filmmaker who tries to hide my mess.

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

Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.

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.

It is fairly easy to grasp abstract moral principles; it can be very difficult to apply them to a given situation, particularly when it involves the moral character of another person.

The lowest standards of ethics of which a right-thinking man can possibly conceive is taught to the common soldier whose trade is to shoot his fellow men. In youth he may have learned the command, 'Thou shalt not kill,' but the ruler takes the boy just as he enters manhood and teaches him that his highest duty is to shoot a bullet through his neighbor's heart - and this, unmoved by passion or feeling or hatred, and without the least regard to right or wrong, but simply because his ruler gives the word.

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

Conscience, the organ of feeling which dominates us and of the opinions which rule us, is presumptuous in the strong, timid in the weak and unfortunate, uneasy in the undecided.

Wizard's Second Rule The greatest harm can result from the best intentions.

It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.

He’d only ever seen a gun once, a smaller one on the hip of that old deputy, a gun he’d always figured was more for show. He stuffed a fistful of deadly rounds in his pocket, thinking how each one could end an individual life, and understanding why such things were forbidden. Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.

Guilt soon learns to lie.

Our virtues are voluntary (and in fact we are in a sense ourselves partly the cause of our moral dispositions, and it is our having a certain character that makes us set up an end of a certain kind), it follows that our vices are voluntary also; they are voluntary in the same manner as our virtues.

A just war is in the long run far better for a man's soul than the most prosperous peace.

Nobody has the right to put another under such a difficulty that he must either hurt the person by telling the truth or hurt himself by telling what is not true.

It is circumstance and proper measure that give an action its character, and make it either good or bad.

Revolting means for good ends make the ends of themselves revolting.