Neil Sheehan Quotes

Of God and Evil, there is nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common Rule of Good and Evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves.

Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.

We always want to find good and bad guys, and I don't believe in that.

What's distinctively shocking about Machiavelli is that he didn't care. He believed not only that politicians must do evil in the name of the public good, but also that they shouldn't worry about it. He was unconcerned, in other words, with what modern thinkers call 'the problem of dirty hands.'

I perhaps ought to say that individually I never was much interested in the Texas question. I never could see much good to come of annexation, inasmuch as they were already a free republican people on our own model.

We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is Manifest Destiny.

I think we're entering a very dangerous time. The West has set itself up, decided it's in charge, not for good intentions, not for the benefit of mankind.

People will justify whatever for a good cause.

You can compromise between good, better, and best, and you can compromise between bad and worse and terrible. But you can't compromise between good and evil. And now people look at the other side as a completely different kind of animal and say, 'They are taking the country down the road to purgatory.' It's complete intolerance.

Nobody thinks that they're evil or bad, they think that they're doing the right thing.

We can no more tolerate neutrality and benevolence toward every conceivable form of discourse, including that of magical thinking, than we can lump together executioner and victim, good and evil.

The idea of good and evil is a myth created by the politicians, the priests, and all those who have an interest to keep it at their mercy.

In true Hollywood fashion the US expounds its interests and power in the world as the triumph of good over evil. The media dismisses any ambiguity in a truly complex world. Instead America's propagandists hand down the Manichean dichotomy - "us and them," "good and bad," "those who are for us and those who are against us.

The supremacist ideology of the Bush Administration stands in opposition to the principles of an open society, which recognize that people have different views and that nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth. The supremacist ideology postulates that just because we are stronger than others, we know better and have right on our side.

Manifest Destiny on the hoof

We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.

With any villain, you have to see things from their point of view and understand that they think what they're doing will make the world a better place.

Even people that are evil believe what they're doing is good. I don't agree with those people, but it's about understanding that there are those kinds of points of view.

The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.

I always tried to play the bad guys as guys who didn't know they were bad guys. There are villains we run into all the time, but they don't think they are doing anything wrong. If they do, they think they are cunning and smart. When people break laws and ethical rules, they justify it in their own terms.

I don't believe so much in good and evil.

Unbounded morality ultimately becomes counterproductive even in terms of the same moral principles being sought. The law of diminishing returns applies to morality.

Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.

Good and evil both increase at compound interest.

I tell you, commander, it's true that some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they're doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved.