John Steinbeck Quotes

No man can tell what the future may bring forth

People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that.

The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has-even if we don't quite know it yet.

I literally have no idea what's to come. I try to just stay in the moment.

You can choose who you want to be the hero [in Hard Candy], but youll be second-guessing yourself -- theres just no right answer. Our society is obsessed with finding good and finding evil, but I think were all capable of anything.

Half of the results of a good intentions are evil; half the results of an evil intention are good.

Our shared world is humanly unquantifiable and ideologically confused. Which one of them is capable of implementing the most recognizable harm or good?

So we reach into the raging chaos, and we cling to it, and we tell ourselves it has meaning, and that the world is good, and we are not evil, and we will all go home in the end.

I find that the interesting challenges, because there's obvious things where, you know, don't be unethical, don't be evil, you know, don't break the law, don't do immoral things, those are all straightforward and don't create ethical dilemmas. The thing that's interesting is when you actually have multiple interests at stake and you have to kind of navigate your way through it.

I find it most remarkable that we who are so intimately involved in the battle between good and evil are even more involved with the shades of gray in between them.

There was no more good or evil in this world than we imagine there to be, either out of greed or out of innocence. Or sometimes madness.

I don't know what I'm going to be doing in two years or even in two weeks. I have to live for today.

In the name of certainty, the greatest crimes have been committed against humanity.

Present mirth hath present laughter. What's to come is still unsure.

It wasn't about believing this or that, it wasn't even about good and evil and right and wrong, it was about finding the strength to bear the discomfort that came with being in the world.

The only boring part of it is finding the fact that got you from point A to point B. Most actors, if they're being honest, are not going to say that that's the most stimulating acting work they've ever done. But the dynamics of staring into the face of evil and it looking back at you, and seeing yourself in that or not, is interesting.

There are many powers in the world, for good or for evil. Some are greater than I am. Against some I have not yet been measured. But my time is coming.

And tomorrow--who knows what happens? Do you get it? I don't know and no one knows--it's all unknown! You understand, that this is the end to the Known? This is the new, the improbable, the unpredictable.

The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking 'pragmatic' decisions.

It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse.

When I left Queen's my future seemed to stretch out before me like a straight road. I thought I could see along it for many a milestone. Now there is a bend in it. I don't know what lies around the bend, but I'm going to believe that the best does.

The hardest fact in the world to accept is the inevitable mixture of evil with good in all things.

We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.

The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy.

What is forgotten, however, is that many times the Good we create leads to Evil that will destroy us.