Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

Villainy wears many masks; none so dangerous as the mask of virtue.

I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

The ethics of sex is a thorny problem. Each of us is forced to grope for a solution he can live with - in the face of preposterous, unworkable, and evil code of so-called 'Morals.' Most of us know the code is wrong, almost everybody breaks it. But we pay Danegeld by feeling guilty and giving lip service. Willy-nilly, the code rides us, dead and stinking, an albatross around the neck.

If you choose the lesser of two evils, you are still choosing evil.

The balance between good and evil, and the choices we make between them, are probably the single most important aspects shaping our personalities and humanity.

As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of good and evil?

Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.

Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit--or a mask.

Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.

You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong - only because cruelty is pleasant or useful to him, In other words, badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.

There they are. See no evil, hear no evil, and...evil.

Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.

Does that not sound odd to you? When God decides who should live or die, he is immoral, When you decide who should live or die, it's your moral right. There was a pin-drop silence.

How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!

D'you know how embarrassing it is to mention good and evil in a scientific laboratory? Have you any idea? One of the reasons I became a scientist was not to have to think about that kind of thing.

The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.

You can’t reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.

So far any one shuns evils, so far as he does good.

After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?

As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates 'called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil.

There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning -- without altogether recognizing it beneath the disguise of ambiguous behavior which it assumes in his presence.

People seldom tell the truths that are worth telling. We ought to choose our truths as carefully as we choose our lies and to select our virtues with as much thought as we bestow upon the selection of our enemies.

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you.

Each one of us has both; good and evil virtues. Those who decide to focus on the good ones succeed in life.

Which is more misshapen,--religion without virtue, or virtue without religion?