Steven Bochco Quotes

The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.

There’s no way you can kill someone and get to the other side of the experience unchanged.

If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.

By each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

Good and evil exist only in terms of the happiness or suffering they create in ourselves and others

You can't have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Who’s saved? Who’s not?

If you ask me if I have this or that principle, tell me what its consequences are, and then I'll tell you whether I have that principle or not.

You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.

Parents don't realize that when they teach you about the Holocaust too early, it ruins you for life.

There's less of a connection for a lot of people between the technical decisions we make and the ethical ramifications we are responsible for.

The inevitability of abortion. But I refuse to accept the amoral consequences that are even far worse than that, which is harvesting them because we decided that as an adult society, we can use children to make our lives better, if you seek the reverse.

The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we have 'improved.

A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous.

When you write about real life, there's always a chance that somebody involved is going to see it and get upset.

Then Henry speaks again. "Did he do it?" I turn to him slowly. "Does it matter?

Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.

A good person is one who follows the Ten Commandments and the golden rule. There is plenty of precedent in history to guide us and we probably evolved to be sensitive to Bible-Golden Rule situations. But the dilemmas faced by a worker - a journalist, an architect, an auditor - or by a citizen (what position to take on stem cell research, whether to run for office, what is the proper balance between taxation and social nets) - are not questions that can be answered by traditional texts or precedents.

You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.

The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.

Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness.

These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together.

For whatever reason, I have never separated the technical from the ethical.

Films used to be about challenging, emotional journeys or moral questions that might make you walk away and re-evaluate how you felt about... whatever. Now we're walking out of the cinema really not thinking about anything, other than the fact that the Hulk had a fight with a robot.

... it is as true in morals as in physics that all force is imperishable; therefore the consequences of a human action never cease.

The Christian and the Materialist hold different beliefs about the universe. They can't both be right. The one who is wrong will act in a way which simply doesn't fit the real universe. Consequently, with the best will in the world, he will be helping his fellow creatures to their destruction.