Harvey Pekar Quotes

I certainly know the difference between right and wrong.

The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That's how most people thought.

The difference of human being behind the guy on the page is in writing, I'm no longer conscious of personal repercussions because for that moment they don't exist. At times, I tell myself, Well, I can always go back and change that or take it out, and I find out that I rarely do. Couple little things here and there: Do unto others. Be a good scout. With all the ironies that entails, I go by that. That's a good way to live.

We know the things that are not good and are right. Those things that we know are wrong, we've got to fix them.

It's something that people who read my materials have asked me in the past. If you don't have principles - the last chapter of the book ["Win"] is all about winning with principles. It's all about applying words to good things, good people, good efforts. Without that inherent accuracy, then even the best words will still fail.

The larger picture is really to swing people's awareness of what really is moral.

How can you do the right thing when you can't figure out what that is? When all you have before you are choices in various shades of wrong?

You're trying to be tricky. What's morality?" "It's the difference between what's right and what you can rationalize." "Must be a human thing." "Exactly.

Without integrity and conscience we lose our freedom.

A book of mine is always a matter of fate. There is something unpredictable about the process of writing, and I cannot prescribe for myself any predetermined course.

We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.

If Truth is taken away from us, then Right and Wrong are taken from us as well. If we don't know Right and Wrong, then we can't, we won't control ourselves, but will look to someone else to bring order through brute force and raw power. We will be controlled by a tyrant, and we will no longer be free.

Ethics are more important than laws. Which means that the exact note is less important than the feeling of the note.

It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that.

Nothing but the right can ever be expedient, since that can never be true expediency which would sacrifice a great good to a less.

The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil.

Those who are most moral are farthest from the problem.

I want to be a writer, not an engineer who writes books.

We talk so much about one's rights... so little about what is actually right.

Little would be wanting to the happiness of life, if every man could conform to the right as soon as he was shown it.

Be more careful of your conscience than of your estate. The latter can be bought and sold; the former never.

It is our choice of good or evil that determines our character, not our opinion about good or evil.

In this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent".

Our policy is, when in doubt, do the right thing.

I'm not naive, I know that bad things happen, but most people do the right thing most of the time. Most people wake up and they try to do what's right for their relationships, whether it's marriage or family. They try to do what's right for their job. They try to make a better world for those around them, and that's what I want to write about.