John Brown Quotes

You undergo too strict a paradox, Striving to make an ugly deed look fair.

Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.

In my own life, I'm pretty good at choosing between good and bad. It's the choices between good and good I find the most difficult to make.

The thematic bucket of vomit that I've been chained to since I was about 9 is the moral complexity of anti-heroism. I have always been interested in good people who do bad things for understandable reasons.

Every man hath a good and a bad angel attending on him in particular all his life long.

The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.

I am the epitome of a walking contradiction for various reasons, only one of which being that I feel my existence is of heaven and hell.

I just felt sick. I was actually executing people. I knew it was wrong, and I should have voted against it. But I didn’t.

I can tell you that good people do bad things.

The battle between free will and listening to the inner voice will remain eternal. Similarly, in the debate over material and spiritual rewards; you cannot have both, as the path to acquire each is different.

What's stronger-the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?

I voted for Stevenson as opposed to Eisenhower because I thought he would make a good president, but against my conscience because I thought that he was too good for the job.

If you keep your eyes so fixed on heaven that you never look at the earth, you will stumble into hell.

It is one of those problems of human nature, which may be noted down, but not solved; - although Ralph felt no remorse at that moment for his conduct towards the innocent, true-hearted girl; although his libertine clients had done precisely what he had expected, precisely what he most wished, and precisely what would tend most to his advantage, still he hated them for doing it, from the very bottom of his soul.

The fruition of what is unlawful must be followed by remorse. The core sticks in the throat after the apple is eaten, and the sated appetite loathes the interdicted pleasure for which innocence was bartered.

That's the problem with having a moral code. We want to destroy the jerkish part of the jerks, but we want to save the human being underneath.

Beholding heaven, and feeling hell.

I'm not a god or the God, but we're all God and we're all potentially divine - and potentially evil. We all have everything within us and the Kingdom of Heaven is nigh and within us, and if you look hard enough you'll see it.

You nearly died today,' he says. 'I almost shot you. Why didn't you shoot me, Tris?' 'I couldn't do that,' I say. 'It would have been like shooting myself.' He looks pained and leans closer to me, so his lips brush mine when he speaks.

I have just been through the process of killing a cistudo for the sake of science; but I cannot excuse myself for this murder, and see that such actions are inconsistent with the poetic perception, however they may serve science, and will affect the quality of my observations. I pray that I may walk more innocently and serenely through nature. No reasoning whatever reconciles me to this act. It affects my day injuriously. I have lost some self-respect. I have a murderer's experience to a degree.

To paraphrase the great poet Dante, the heavens swirl above us and our eyes are still cast to the ground.

Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience.

Her lord father had taught her never to steal, but it was growing harder to remember why.

She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it.

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.