Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

There's good and bad in everybody. I wasn't looking for the good, or looking for the bad. This is a man who signed his pact with the devil 20 years ago, and he's learned to live with it. He's tried to protect his family from it.

People have their complexities. They have their heroic moments and their villainous moments, too.

White shall not neutralize the black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so: life's business being just the terrible choice.

The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an unuprooted small corner of evil. Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

The best men are not consistent in good--why should the worst men be consistent in evil?

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.

In real life, I don't think anybody is all one shade. People who are perceived to be really good have bad thoughts and inclinations that they sometimes act on, I'm sure, and people have different sides to themselves.

Mike and I are always drawn to the idea that there is light and dark inside every being, rather than the old two-dimensional trope of good versus evil.

I did not want to depict Al Gashey as evil. I wanted him to come across as someone who did what he did for reasons that were compelling. Whether or not we agree with him is a different matter.

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

To me, the more interesting villains are the ones you can, in some sense, relate to or sympathize with at times. Maybe you sympathize with them one moment; the next moment, they do something truly atrocious, and you feel bad you ever sympathized with them in the first place.

Our errors and our controversies, in the sphere of morality, arise sometimes from looking on men as though they could be altogether bad, or altogether good.

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?

One of my themes is that there is good and evil in everyone. I was not out to make these guys heroes. I really don't believe in heroes. The best of people have a dark side and it's a constant struggle for the better side to survive and to thrive.

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart...

No one is entirely good or evil; that is what the Warrior thinks when he has a new opponent.

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.

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

On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.

Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.

In all of us, there is a struggle between the good and the bad. It makes it more palpable and real to play such people as an actor.

I consider myself a fairly ethical individual while I do have a lot of dichotomies within me. We're all victims of our own hypocrisy at times.

Classical tragedy was the war between good and evil. We wanted evil to be defeated and good to be victorious. But the battle in modern tragedy is between good and good. And no matter which side wins, we'll still be heartbroken.

What 'True Blood' does really well is that it balances on the line between good and evil - you blur the distinction between the two.