Daniel Defoe Quotes

Doesn't the fight for survival also justify swindle and theft? In self defence, anything goes.

I do what I've got to do to survive, to keep my teeth in my head, and my head on my shoulders. I apologize to whoever can't put that together and understand that.

Early in my career I had to be a goon to survive. I did everything I had to do and probably some things I shouldn't have.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

I'm not the kind of person that would step on people just to get where I wanted to be, but I have crossed moral boundaries when I've either been afraid or desperate.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

Hey, any time you're throwing bodies over board it is to save yourself.

I'll say anything to live.

I have no regrets. I think we did right, and we couldn't have done differently. In wartime, it was a desperate time .... When you are in a war to the death, I don't think you stand around and ask, is it right?

Some people were breaking in to get food for their families. They were in survivor mode. Don’t confuse that with a guy carting off a 64 inch television set and looting…. The test is take the mirror and put it in front of your face and ask what would you do.

But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can't live with what they've done.

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

How long had he been doing what was necessary instead of what was right? In a fair world they would be one and the same.

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

Your problem is that you have been too honest for too long. Once you start doing it, lying is simpler than breathing.

It doesn't make sense to have to do the wrong thing in order to do the right thing.

Inauthenticity is endemic in American politics today. The political backrooms where I spent much of my career were just as benighted as my personal life, equally crowded with shadowy strangers and compromises, truths I hoped to deny. I lived not in one closet but in many.

I think I probably have the philosophy of a poor man. You know, like maybe I'd steal the pennies off a dead man's eyes.

The lives of the best of us are spent in choosing between evils.

Grub first, then ethics.

The only reason I'm in Hollywood is that I don't have the moral courage to refuse the money.

When we are confronted with extreme situations, we forget about moral issues; we simply act and must then accept the consequences.

I probably made a few pictures I shouldn't have done, but I have four sons and I have to pay the rent. If you have a decision to make about whether or not you can buy groceries at the market or whether or not you're going to make a bad movie, you're going to make a bad movie.

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.