Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Moral: It all depends.

My idea of what's good and bad and right and wrong is maybe greyer than most, and I like writing about that.

I love the gray area between right and wrong.

Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.

Moral certainty is never more than probability.

Good and bad, what's good and bad? I don't know.

You know how confusing the whole good-evil concept is for me.

I don't think there is a right or wrong anymore. Only horrible and not-quite-so-horrible.

In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone's just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you've figured it out and done it, you'll never know whether you were right or wrong. You'll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn't.

I've always been fascinated by the idea that there's no such thing as evil; it's all in your point of view. To one group a suicide bomber is the antichrist and to one he's a hero.

What is right, what is wrong, how can anyone say? I view very, very, few things as Right with a capital R.

Nothing [is] more uncertain than the moral sensitivities of a political body.

'Right' and 'wrong' aren't words a linguist uses.

Even people that are evil believe what they're doing is good. I don't agree with those people, but it's about understanding that there are those kinds of points of view.

I think most people are indifferent in their evaluation of what is good or bad.

I think it’s just as likely that someone could say that this place, right here, is heaven, hell and earth all at the same time. And we still wouldn’t know what to do differently. Everyone just muddles through, trying not to make too many mistakes.

There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain't nice, but that's as far as any man got a right to say.

Moral activity? There is scarcely such a thing possible! Everything is sketchy. The world does nothing but sketch.

There was no more good or evil in this world than we imagine there to be, either out of greed or out of innocence. Or sometimes madness.

Good and evil - I don't believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil.

Good and Evil are names that signify our appetites and aversions, which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different: And diverse men differ not only in their judgment, on the senses of what is pleasant and unpleasant to the taste, smell, hearing, touch, and sight, but also of what is conformable, or disagreeable to Reason, in the actions of the common life. Nay, the same man, in diverse times, differs from himself, and one time praiseth, that is, calleth Good, what another time he dispraiseth, and calleth Evil.

The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy.

Uncertainty is wondrous, and.. certainty, were it to be real, would be moral death.

Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.

The gray area, the place between black and white - that's the place where life happens.