Augustus Hare Quotes

I've learned a lot about good and evil. They are not always what they appear to be.

I've yet to meet a person in my life who doesn't have some moral ambiguity.

Playing evil is just not interesting. I don't think anyone who does evil stuff thinks they're doing evil stuff. That's the scary part.

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

People's character is their behaviour - we're all capable of good and evil.

No writer besides Shakespeare has created more memorable characters attached to vices and virtues. In even their least sympathetic characters, one senses a kind of helplessness to passion quivering between the poles of good and evil.

I like to see the difference between good and evil as kind of like the foul line at a baseball game. It's very thin, it's made of something very flimsy like lime, and if you cross it, it really starts to blur where fair becomes foul and foul becomes fair.

All things truly wicked start from an innocence.

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

We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.

A think may look specious in theory, and yet be ruinous in practice; a thing may look evil in theory, and yet be in practice excellent.

There are the good and bad and every morrally ambiguous shade in between.

You can't judge a character, and you're never going to always play characters that are morally sound or know right from wrong.

If you can write someone off as a bad person, then it's easier, but when someone is also great and noble and generous and kind and funny and contradictory, it gets harder.

Unalloyed heroes and unalloyed villains make me suspicious.

Just because somebody cusses doesn't make him a bad person. Just because a guy doesn't cuss doesn't make him a good person.

I don't believe so much in good and evil.

None of us wants to be judged by our worst act on our worst day, and we consistently judge Burr for that. He was not a perfect man, but he's not a villain. He's a dude, just a guy.

There is nothing called negative character. The negativity and positivity exists in all of us.

Nobody really thinks they're evil.

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.

Never trust a shiny surface. They hide a multitude of flaws.

I know the difference between right and wrong, and I can tell good from bad. But I also know that the more difficult decisions come when we have to choose between good and better. The toughest calls of all are those we have to make between bad and worse.

But, irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious people, these elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes. It was strange to see that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints.

Humanity is not perfect in any fashion; no more in the case of evil than in that of good. The criminal has his virtues, just as the honest man has his weaknesses.