Anthony Burgess Quotes

The distinction between good and evil is meaningless if one does not have the freedom to choose between them.

Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.

Choice is the essence of ethics: if there were no choice there would be no ethics, no good, no evil; good and evil have meaning only insofar as man is free to choose.

The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.

Dangerous thing, giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil. And the capacity to make the wrong choice more often than not.

There comes a moment in every life when a choice must be made between right and wrong, between good and evil, between light and darkness. These decisions are made in an instant, but with repercussions that last a lifetime.

To choose evil is to choose freedom, emancipation from all restraint.

If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

That is the true definition of sin; when knowing right you do the lower, ah, then you sin. Where there is no knowledge, sin is not present.

While early childhood experiences may impel, they do not compel. In the end, evil is a matter of choice.

Most men, I am convinced, have an unmistakable feeling at the final moment of significant choice that they are making a free decision, that they can really decide which one of two or more roads to follow.

I suspect that here theists and atheists would agree: Human beings have within them the ability to choose evil or good. We wake up each day facing the age-old struggle of good and evil. In some situations, mental illness clouds our judgment.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

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

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be either good or evil.

The more...we consider man to be free, the less we can say, that he can neglect to use reason, or choose evil in preference to good

Everythings a choice. Nobody's born good. Nobody's born evil. It's always a choice.

And does man simply choose evil, or does he create it?

It is always man's ideas which drive his actions. This has, at times, resulted in great evil; but as we look around us, we cannot doubt that it has resulted in greater good.

If God were to remove all evil from our world (but somehow leave human beings on the planet), it would mean that the essence of 'humanness' would be destroyed. We would become robots.

He has a spirit-a soul- and therfore a choice. I will belive that Aurox will chose Light, even if Darkness resides within him. None of us is entirely good. Or evil.

God created the possibility of evil; people actualized that potentiality. The source of evil is not God's power but mankind's freedom. Even an all-powerful God could not have created a world in which people had genuine freedom and yet there was no potentiality for sin, because our freedom includes the possibility of sin within its own meaning.

Without that freedom to sin there is also no freedom to love.

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