David Farr Quotes

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

Every soldier, every cop who's faced with a decision to make, a life or death, does the best he or she can.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

Invite characters of surprising and moral character, or at least those who grapple with what is right or those who make decisions that shock.

I wanted to make a redemptive thriller that didn't end with some kind of big, crazy shootout and blood spill, but more of a collision of ideas and a discussion of ethics.

Though many have tried, no one has ever yet explained away the decisive fact that science, which can do so much, cannot decide what it ought to do.

Necessity makes an honest man a knave.

It is seldom very hard to do one's duty when one knows what it is, but it is often exceedingly difficult to find this out.

I don't think anyone sets out to do something bad, it's just that it's very difficult.

Identify the moral dilemma driving the novel. the successful novel will haunt a reader because it deals with some ethical or moral dilemma that makes the reader wonder what he or she would do in the protagonist's place.

Oh but I'd pay anything to keep my conscience clean.I'm keeping my eyes on the the exit sign. Steady now.

What should we do? We have no wish to interrupt the destroyer's work of saving lives... But war is war and the people being picked up out of the water are soldiers bound for the front; soldiers who are to shoot at our German brothers... The question whether we are to perish in despair or defiance, or survive all trails with a live conscience, depends wholly and solely on whether we believe in the forgiveness of sins. This 25th January was the turning point in my life, because it opened my eyes to the utter impossibility of a moral universe.

A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.

When you're put in a position where you're having to decide, Is this a good decision? Is this the right decision for everybody involved? - it makes me feel a little unsteady, unsure.

Freedom is a ladder: one side of the ladder reaches hell, the other side touches heaven. It is the same ladder; the choice is yours.

When a person is born, he can embark on only one of three roads of life: if you go right, the wolves will eat you; if you go left, you’ll eat the wolves; if you go straight, you’ll eat yourself.

The difficulty is to know conscience from self-interest.

To this day I don’t know if he was struggling with the moral implications of gunning down half a dozen civilians, or if he was mentally counting to see if he had that many shells left in the gun.

Every act has both good and evil results. The best we can do is lean to the light.

Four experts had an appointment with an ordinary man. They needed him to ratify their findings, or anything they achieved would be meaningless. As they drove to meet him, they knocked down a man on the road. He was dying. If they tried to save him, they might miss their appointment. They decided that their appointment, which concerned all of us, was more important than the life of one man. They drove on to keep their appointment. They did not know that the man they were to meet was the man they had left to die.

Faith is a choice like any other. If you're picking a career or a husband - or deciding whether to have a baby - there are feelings and reasons pro and con out the wazoo. But thinking it through is - at the final hour - horse dookey. You can only try out.

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

If one develops good habits and routines, it is possible to be a responsible educator most of the time; and to marshal the special energies and reflection for those times, when the correct course of action is not clear, or when one is weighing one wrong against another wrong.

Every day we make our way through a moral forest, along pathways ever branching. Often we get lost. When the array of paths before us is so perplexing that we can't make a choice, or won't, we can hope that we will be given a sign to guide us. A reliance on signs, however, can lead to the evasion of all moral obligations, and thus earn a terrible judgment.

Unfortunately sometimes one can't do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.