Rich Mullins Quotes

Stanley didn't shy away from true humanity or from the ugliness that all people are capable of.

In the Bible, there is absolutely no motivation for Judas, other than that he is sort of a 100 percent figure of evil. And it seemed to me that that was probably not the case.

History is not the story of heroes entirely. It is often the story of cruelty and injustice and shortsightedness. There are monsters, there is evil, there is betrayal. That's why people should read Shakespeare and Dickens as well as history ~~ they will find the best, the worst, the height of noble attainment and the depths of depravity.

I think it would be very boring dramatically to have a film where everybody was a lawyer or doctor and had no faults. To me, the most important thing is to be truthful.

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested. Even the real monsters have to have a spark of something you can relate to.

One principle I've been fighting for that doesn't endear me to a lot of people is that black people can be just as complicated and screwed up as white people. Our motives can be just as base and violent. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.

I'm just writing about people. People are dark and complicated. I'm trying to tell the truth; that's all that I do.

I'm interested in people that don't always do the right thing, its much more akin to what I know about life.

No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.

In the nature of man we find three principle causes of quarrel. First, competition; second diffidence; thirdly, glory.

I think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.

It's very hard to play a man without any flaws.

People do bad things, but that doesn't mean they don't have other colors or qualities.

I don't think that swearing or gratuitous violence or sex make a show better. I just think there are natural rhythms to a human being in these situations, and what happens in these situations that cable allows is a natural reaction.

'Rakta Charitra' was more about human conflict than politics.

I don't want to watch a show or a movie about the guy who doesn't have any problems, who is sort of a goodie two shoes and just does everything morally right, because that's not the person I relate to. That's not who I am. That's not what anyone is.

What's a better foundation for drama? You have power, you have ambition, you have sex... that's the stuff of drama.

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.

If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

The Bible - the wisest document ever known in human existence, which defies the ravages of time and change because it contains the truth that cannot be changed or invalidated.

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.

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.

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.

The Bible is as much a book of religion with me as the Gita and the Koran.

People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.