Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

People do things in the names of good, and in the name of ideals, but the world isn't that simple. So they end up doing things that aren't necessarily good. Even if they think they're doing the right thing, but when viewed from a different perspective they can look barbaric and crazy.

Human beings are made up of many different values, and sometimes those values are in tension with each other.

We live in a much more complicated time than when Superman was created 75 years ago. Or even when Superman The Movie was created in the 70s. There are great advances but with those come a great many complications.We felt that the character needed to grow up in that kind of environment and had to face those kinds of colossal choices that were not going to be easy. It's difficult to figure out the right path. And even if you do good there are causalities to your choices. We thought it would be compelling.

Iraq's invasion of Kuwait is a case of bad men doing wrong things for wicked reasons. This is the full-sized or standard purebred evil and is easily recognized even by moral neophytes. Other malignities-drugs in America, famine in Africa and everything in the Middle East-are more complex. When combating those evils people sometimes have trouble deciding whom to shoot.

Simple things are always the most difficult.

The pure and simple truth Is rarely pure and never simple. What's a boy to do When lies and truth are both sinful?

No human endeavour can ever be wholly good... it must always have a cost.

What were good and evil, really, but stupid categories? Stupid categories that restricted people and punished or rewarded them based on how they responded to their own natures, natures they really didn't have any way to control.

The Bible is not a book for the faint of heart -- it is a book full of all the greed and glory and violence and tenderness and sex and betrayal that befits mankind. It is not the collection of pretty little anecdotes mouthed by pious little church mice -- it does not so much nibble at our shoe leather as it cuts to the heart and splits the marrow from the bone. It does not give us answers fitted to our small-minded questions, but truth that goes beyond what we even know to ask.

One of my themes is that there is good and evil in everyone. I was not out to make these guys heroes. I really don't believe in heroes. The best of people have a dark side and it's a constant struggle for the better side to survive and to thrive.

Moral sensibilities are nowadays at such cross-purposes that to one man a morality is proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it.

I used to think I knew what was right and what was wrong, and who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are. Then the world got very gray, and I didn't know anything for a long time

In a perfect world everything would be either black or white, right or wrong, and everyone would know the difference. But this isn't a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is.

To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a kind of luxury.

Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.

Good people can do terrible things, and that's what life is all about, the complexities and grey areas. And often characters aren't written that way in movies, especially characters for women. So you end up being either one thing or the other.

Why do any of us act the way we do? Is it our beliefs or our biology that shapes us? Lauren Grodstein considers this eternal question through the story of Andrew Waite, scientist, father, widower, struggling to raise two daughters, living with the ghost of his wife, facing a test of his faith in science. There are no easy answers here, just the honest complexity of human beings trying their best to be good people. The Explanation for Everything is moving, beautiful, and wonderfully funny.

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

Moral issues rarely have yes or no answers. -Myles to Alanna when she asks about the Gift

Morality is the struggle of the bound will to get free and is the proof that we have come from perfection. . . .

Good and evil both increase at compound interest.

But there are times in this harum-scarum world when figuring out the right thing to do is quite simple, but doing the right thing is simply impossible.

Most of this film, however, is about interpretation - are these people terrorists or freedom fighters? Are they good or bad? Is cutting timber good or bad? And I don't feel like the answers to those questions are simple, so we don't try to answer them for the audience. I wanted to elicit the strongest - and most heartfelt - arguments from the characters in the film and let those arguments bang up against the strongest arguments of their opponents.

You can choose who you want to be the hero [in Hard Candy], but youll be second-guessing yourself -- theres just no right answer. Our society is obsessed with finding good and finding evil, but I think were all capable of anything.

Sometimes there are good reasons to do bad things.