Mark Twain Quotes

Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.

It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

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

Everyone spends their lives trying to balance their world between good and evil.

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

It is not easy to do something good, but it is extremely difficult to do something bad.

In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.

Many a man renounces morals, but with great difficulty the conception, 'morality.' Morality is the 'idea' of morals, their intellectual power, their power over the conscience; on the other hand, morals are too material to rule the mind, and do not fetter an 'intellectual' man, a so-called independent, a 'freethinker.'

There's no such thing as morality.

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

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.

Evil, by definition, is that which endangers the good, and the good is that which we perceive as a value.

History teaches us virtue, but nature never ceases to teachh us vice.

Evil, which is our companion all our days, is not to be treated as a foe. It is wrong to cocker vice, but we grow narrow and pithless if we are furtive about it, for this is at best a pretense, and the sage knows good and evil are kindred. The worst of men harm others, and the best injure themselves.

Any time the character is in a moral quandary is interesting. That's been true from the Greeks on down.

When virtue is at liberty, so to some extent is vice.

Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics.

In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.

Be virtuous and you will be vicious.

I want to show people how there are variations and different interpretations of good and evil.

There is the moral spectrum in 'Fargo,' and you see it in other Coen brothers movies, where you have a very good character on one end and a very bad character on the other.

I don't think good and evil are polarized.

Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.