Gregory Stock Quotes

When a good man lends himself to the advocacy of slavery, he must, at least for a time, feel himself to be any where but at home, amongst his new thoughts, doctrines, and modes of reasoning.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

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.'

It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren't carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.

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.

On some levels, you can also have this feeling that we are being duped, somehow. And that the world is at play for something you would understand more if it were pure ideology. It is a very strange time and also basic things are being taken away.

I'd read a lot of thrillers about politicians and presidents, but never one where you flip the stereotypes and make good people bad and bad people good.

One of the key issues will be personal honour vs. the good of the many, and unforeseen consequences.

Yet today our splendid theory of government is confronted by a great peril. We have become blind to evils that menace us. We are confronted with glutted markets and idle labor. It is a condition that makes it possible for a few men to become landlords of a proud city like this while God's poor are packed in the slums. Such a condition is not only a menace to Republican institutions, but a travesty upon the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The issue is not whether there are serious moral and practical costs to employing torture—of course there are for torture is evil. That is precisely why the choice of whether employ it to avert a greater evil is a tragic one.

Man's indecency to man all over the world rules out the idea of humanity as an actuality. It is a dream of young idealists. In practice a misnomer

A good thing which prevents us from enjoying a greater good is in truth an evil.

I am ashamed of a human race that can continue to allow the sordid ambitions of politicized groups who genuinely feel that right is on their side, and can therefore instigate such atrocities in the name of their own sense of right and wrong.

There are times when the end justifies the means. But when you build an argument based on a whole series of such times, you may find that you've constructed an entire philosophy of evil." --Luke Skywalker

If in this wide world, teeming with abundant supplies for human want, to thousands of wretched creatures no choice is open, save between starvation and sin, may we not justly say that there is something utterly wrong in the system that permits such things to be?

It is better to inconsistently save some lives than to consistently save none.

Discrimination and multiple deprivations of human rights are also frequently part of the problem, sentencing entire populations to poverty... It is surely a matter of outrage that over half a million women die annually from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. This is nearly half the annual global death toll, and arguably, a direct reflection of the disempowerment of women in social, economic and political life.

There's racism and sexism and ageism and all sorts of idiocies. But bad news is not news. We've had bad news as a species for a long time. We've had slavery and human sacrifice and the holocaust and brutalities of such measure.

To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals.

I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win.

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

Most things that are politically right are morally wrong

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.