Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

Our actions are neither so good nor so evil as our impulses.

What 'Twilight Zone' did was show we all have a great capacity for good and evil.

I feel like humans, when you're faced with decisions, you can go up and down: duality.

Where are there are two desires in a man's heart he has no choice between the two but must obey the strongest, there being no such thing as free will in the composition of any human being that ever lived.

Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.

People have their complexities. They have their heroic moments and their villainous moments, too.

The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an unuprooted small corner of evil. Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be either good or evil.

The hero has to be an archetype; they have to be like a dream; they have to be perfect. The evil is closer to us.

You have more real truth to draw from if you are playing evil. We see so much of it around us in our culture, and we also have so much of it in our nature, which we are always warring against, as it were.

There is good and evil in each of us, and you can easily be led to the dark side.

I like to believe that most human beings go about things with a point of view that they're just doing what they feel like they need to do at that time. Sometimes people make bad decisions, but it's not evil, not malicious.

As the greatest liar tells more truths than falsehoods, so may it be said of the worst man, that he does more good than evil.

Motives are better than actions. Men drift into crime. Of evil they do more than they contemplate, and of good they contemplate more than they do.

Before you condemn me my friends, I suggest you look deep inside you. For good and evil exists in us all.

I think people respond to villains because people in general are more villainous than heroic.

There's always the question of what is good and evil and the gray area in between where that most people live. In everyday life, things aren't black or white, but rather there's a lot of coping and really tough decision making.

People with the purest souls are capable of the greatest evils.

The balance between good and evil, and the choices we make between them, are probably the single most important aspects shaping our personalities and humanity.

All of the films I have made, that I have chosen to make, are all about the thin line between good and evil. And also the thin line that exists in each and every one of us. That's what my films are about.

The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.

All human beings search for either reasons to be good, or excuses to be bad.

Inability to tell good from evil is the greatest worry of man's life.