Jacob Bronowski Quotes

Fantasy is an area where it is possible to talk about right and wrong, good and evil, with a straight face. In mainstream fiction and even in a good deal of mystery, these things are presented as simply two sides of the same coin. Never really more than a matter of where you happen to be standing.

Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good... Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.

Some things must be good in themselves, else there could be no measure whereby to lay out good and evil.

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.

Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.

The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil.

People's character is their behaviour - we're all capable of good and evil.

Willing or preferring is the same with respect to good and evil, that judging is with respect to truth or falsehood.

I like to see the difference between good and evil as kind of like the foul line at a baseball game. It's very thin, it's made of something very flimsy like lime, and if you cross it, it really starts to blur where fair becomes foul and foul becomes fair.

Judge Taney can do many things, but he cannot…change the essential nature of things—making evil good, and good, evil.

Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.

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

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world - and there clearly are - then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

At the end of the day, if there are truly ethical considerations, those have to override scientific considerations.

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and when people start getting it confused, that means they need to sit down with some real people.

Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.

There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.

The literary depiction of life and its moral dilemmas compel us to use our conscience, to make those infallible distinctions between right and wrong.

Those ethical choices often are made every day at a time, minute by minute in ways that you may not even relate to ethics, so I'm going to walk them through the whole story from that perspective and hopefully they'll be able to walk away with something good from it.

The power of choosing good and evil is within the reach of all.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

I do not believe in the concept of good and evil in my personal life, in the real world. I just don't believe it. I never try to judge.

It may not have the virtuous ring of the golden rule, but the maxim 'never say never' is one of the most important in ethics.