Michael Palin Quotes

I always end up taking people that are morally ambiguous.

When it's a moral grey zone, the audience has to think about what they feel and what they think is right or wrong. You want to affect your audience and make them think.

I don't believe so much in good and evil.

I've learned a lot about good and evil. They are not always what they appear to be.

The difference is too nice - Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

People want to know if I have a moral standpoint that they should be picking up on, and the truth is, I don't. I don't want people to think that I'm trying to tell them to feel a certain way. I think that's cheap filmmaking.

You have principles. You test them as accurately as you can. Eventually, they might break down.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

I don't think any of us know how we would react until we were put in a situation where we have to do something bad or do something good. I think I'd like to believe I'd act like a decent human being, but I'm realistic to know I don't know.

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, 'I'm a bad guy.' They think they're the right guy.

We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.

You can't judge a character, and you're never going to always play characters that are morally sound or know right from wrong.

No villain thinks of himself as a villain, and that's the approach I always take.

Nobody really thinks they're evil.

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.

Virtue and vice, evil and good, are siblings, or next-door neighbors, Easy to make mistakes, hard to tell them apart.

It's fine to criticize somebody else's crimes and misdeeds, but you don't talk about your own. The only exception is a country that is defeated. And even that is rather nuanced.

To be ashamed of one's immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one's morality.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

I consider myself a fairly ethical individual while I do have a lot of dichotomies within me. We're all victims of our own hypocrisy at times.

He who is mistaken in an action which he sincerely believes to be right may be an enemy, but retains our esteem.

I don't know if it's harder but when you're playing a real person you want to honor their memory - even if they're a criminal or someone that the public loathed. That can be challenging.

I didn't have evil intentions, but I guess I did have power.

What 'True Blood' does really well is that it balances on the line between good and evil - you blur the distinction between the two.