Richard Hofstadter Quotes

On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.

I don't think good and evil are polarized.

My idea of what's good and bad and right and wrong is maybe greyer than most, and I like writing about that.

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.

Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide... I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you're fighting.

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.

Evil is a really tough concept for me. The idea of a villain that is bad for bad's sake seems kind of absurd.

The character of human life, like the character of the human condition, like the character of all life, is "ambiguity": the inseparable mixture of good and evil, the true and false, the creative and destructive forces-both individual and social.

What were good and evil, really, but stupid categories? Stupid categories that restricted people and punished or rewarded them based on how they responded to their own natures, natures they really didn't have any way to control.

If the fiercest conglomerate monsters had souls, with all that implied, who could condemn them as evil?

In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which.

Virtue that transgresses is but patched with sin; and sin that amends is but patched with virtue.

You know how confusing the whole good-evil concept is for me.

He has a spirit-a soul- and therfore a choice. I will belive that Aurox will chose Light, even if Darkness resides within him. None of us is entirely good. Or evil.

On the level of the Son there is no answer to the question of good and evil; there is only an incurable separation of the opposites. . . . It seems to me to be the Holy Spirit's task and charge to reconcile and reunite the opposites in the human individual through a special development of the human soul.

You may never understand How the stranger is inspired For he is not always evil, And he is not always wrong.

Every act has both good and evil results. The best we can do is lean to the light.

I am unwilling to be wholly good—and please don't regard me as wholly evil!

Good and evil both increase at compound interest.

a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful.

As much as some people would like to believe, for their own peace of mind, that the appearance of evil in this world had a clean cause, the truth was never that simple.

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

There is even the dignity of vice.

If some incarnation of evil as unambiguous as Hitler appeared again, I would have no moral qualms about killing the enemy. But in the modern world of moral murkiness, I prefer to keep my hands as clean of enemy blood as possible.

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.