Charles de Lint Quotes

Necessity makes an honest man a knave.

Every nation necessarily inhabits a morally compromised space. All too often our ideals seem to be held to ransom by what we believe, rightly or wrongly, to be objective reality.

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

In trying to avoid one sin I've committed another.

In theory it may seem all right to some, but when it comes to being made the instrument of the Lord's vengeance, I myself don't like it.

It is impossible to reign innocently.

Many of us, whether in the jungles of Asia or on the streets of Chicago, had discovered that noble causes can lead to ignoble actions and that we were capable of sacrificing honor to a sense of efficacy.

I think you always feel like you're about a hair's breadth away from being a bad actor anyway... It's not too hard to let the rope go slack, so to speak.

it's wrong to be right; it's right to be wrong.

The lesser evil is also evil.

The trail of the serpent reaches into all the lucrative professions and practices of man. Each has its own wrongs. Each finds a tender and very intelligent conscience a disqualification for success. Each requires of the practitioner a certain shutting of the eyes, a certain dapperness and compliance, an acceptance of customs, a sequestration from the sentiments of generosity and love, a compromise of private opinion and lofty integrity.

Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community of nations only by courting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb.

Everyone makes moral choices that better themselves and hurt someone else along the way - and whether or not the means justify the ends. And that, to me, is universal.

When one is under pressure, one may lie in order to protect the religion, this is taught in the Qur'an.

God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous

It is sometimes rational to do what is wrong, and sometimes irrational to do what is right

There are many who have grave scruples about deceiving but think it as nothing to deceive themselves.

The most reckless sinner against his own conscience has always in the background the consolation that he will go on in this course only this time, or only so long, but that at such a time he will amend. We may be assured that we do not stand clear with our own consciences so long as we determine or project, or even hold it possible, at some future time to alter our course of action.

Where two motives, neither of them perfectly justifiable, may be assigned, the worst has the chance of being preferred.

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil", it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.

How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?

I think ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense.

There are worse things than a lie... I have found... that it may be well to choose one sin in order that another may be shunned.

Cunning is none of the best nor worst qualities; it floats between virtue and vice; there is scarce any exigence where it may not, and perhaps ought not to be supplied by prudence.

Virtue by calculation is the virtue of vice.