Greg Iles Quotes

High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

Normal people, who can be good people but do bad things, are very interesting to me, and people that never get a parking ticket or never do a bad thing in their lives can be really dangerous.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.

We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.

As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn't know the bad he might do.

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.

I consider nothing low but ignorance, vice, and meanness, characteristics generally found where the animal propensities predominate over the higher sentiments.

They err … who think that virtue consists of words .. good actions are the glory of virtue.

Virtue is not loved enough, because she is not seen; and vice loseth much detestation, because her ugliness is secret

We do not despise all those who have vices, but we do despise those that have no virtue.

I think my characters are all fairly fundamentally decent, even if they have negative characteristics.

No man is so exquisitely honest or upright in living, but that ten times in his life he might not lawfully be hanged.

And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor's pocket? No, it's not as easy as that. If that were all, I'd say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren't. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.

People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect.

Honesty: The ability to resist small temptations.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

One of the standards on which your happiness is based, now and in your future, is moral purity.

Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.

Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.

I cotton to the idea that people are much closer to being flawed; they have problems and don't always make the right choices.

Virtues, like essences, lose their fragrance when exposed.

Bad's the best of us.

Virtue must be valuable, if men and women of all degrees pretend to have it.