Anthony Burgess Quotes

Ah, Miss Harriet, it would do us no harm to remember oftener than we do, that vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!

Evil, which is our companion all our days, is not to be treated as a foe. It is wrong to cocker vice, but we grow narrow and pithless if we are furtive about it, for this is at best a pretense, and the sage knows good and evil are kindred. The worst of men harm others, and the best injure themselves.

Men are not altogether bad or altogether good.

Good and evil. Right and wrong.Those are two fundamental opposing concepts that define the nature of humankind.

People live in the middle. I think everyone does. Good is on one side, bad is on the other side, and we live in the middle.

And one of the elders of the city , said , speak to us of good and evil. And he answered : You are good in countless ways , and you are not evil when you are not good .

We are very wrong to think that some fault or other can exclude virtue, or to consider the alliance of good and evil as a monstrosity or an enigma.

There is some good in the worst of us, and some evil in the best of us.

Kill a man who needs killing, and sometimes others pay for it. The question is, was it worth doing it anyway? There's always a balance, you know. Good and evil. Light and Shadow. We would not be human if there wasn't a balance.

a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful.

Most virtue lies between two vices.

It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

I'm very interested in good and evil and the moral natures of people.

Nobody is all good or all bad.

No human being in history was all good or all bad, or all black or all white.

I don't think anybody's all good or all bad.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

Life isn't one-dimensional. The world isn't simply divided into good versus evil. I think we're all capable of both.

Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.

I think that fiction is an excellent place for us to struggle with questions of good and evil, and humanity and inhumanity.

I'm enormously interested to see where neuroscience can take us in understanding these complexities of the human brain and how it works, but I do think there may be limits in terms of what science can tell us about what does good and evil mean anyway, and what are those concepts about?

Be not righteous overmuch.

In every extreme there is vice and not virtue.

… vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!

Nobody is all good or bad.