Marquis de Sade Quotes

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

You can compromise between good, better, and best, and you can compromise between bad and worse and terrible. But you can't compromise between good and evil. And now people look at the other side as a completely different kind of animal and say, 'They are taking the country down the road to purgatory.' It's complete intolerance.

I've been fascinated by the idea that evil is the absence of empathy.

What 'Twilight Zone' did was show we all have a great capacity for good and evil.

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

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an unuprooted small corner of evil. Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

The foundations of society have cracked as a result of the revolutionary reforms....The definitions and boundary lines of good and evil have disappeared.

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.

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

The world is made up of good and evil, and everybody has their own take, and everybody thinks they are on the good side, and a very few, select group of us will admit that we come from the dark side.

At the end of the day, one of the biggest misconceptions of Ghost is that it's just about the devil. It's always been about mankind and living.

Our actions are neither so good nor so evil as our impulses.

The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist.

Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine.

Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow. In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black.

I'm a pretty solid Christian. But even as an altar boy, I was always asking the bigger questions--you know: if God is, in fact, good, what is all this death I see? And if God is gentle, what is all this suffering I see? I've found some of the answers in Eastern religion. It explained my Christianity to me. Good and evil are the same thing. You can't have one without the other. It's the balance, it's the temperance of things.

Until mankind realizes that there is, in truth, no good, and there is, in truth, no evil-there will be no peace.

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.

Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

The world is, was, will always be filled with good and evil, because good and evil is the yin and yang of the human condition.

The world is a den of thieves, and night is falling. Evil breaks its chains and runs through the world like a mad dog. The poison affects us all. No one escapes. Therefore let us be happy while we are happy. Let us be kind, generous, affectionate and good. It is necessary and not at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world.

Evil conquered?' said Gwydion. 'You have learned much, but learn this last and hardest of lessons. You have conquered only the enchantments of evil. That was the easiest of your tasks, only a beginning, not an ending. Do you believe evil itself to be so quickly overcome? Not so long as men still hate and slay each other, when greed and anger goad them. Against these even a flaming sword cannot prevail, but only that portion of good in all men's hearts whose flame can never be quenched.

The good, we do it; the evil, that is fortune; man is always right, and destiny always wrong.

A rational nature admits of nothing but what is serviceable to the rest of mankind.

Good and evil have nothing to do with gods. It has to do with us.