W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

Doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you.

It is sometimes rational to do what is wrong, and sometimes irrational to do what is right

In the real world in which we live, you always have to choose between evils. And in choosing between evils, you have to have moral criteria for how to make those choices.

Whether it's corporate investigations or comedy, there are certain inherent truths to trying to get what you want while trying to be a decent person doing it.

More often there's a compromise between ethics and expediency.

In life, everybody faces choices between doing what's popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what's lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.

What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises?

Sometimes you're going to be faced with situations where the line isn't clear between what's right and what's wrong.Your heart will tell you to do one thing and your brain will tell you to do something different. In the end, all that's left is to look at both sides and go with your best judgment.

I know the difference between right and wrong, and I can tell good from bad. But I also know that the more difficult decisions come when we have to choose between good and better. The toughest calls of all are those we have to make between bad and worse.

Sometimes you have to do what’s wrong in order to do what’s right.

In trying to avoid one sin I've committed another.

In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both.

If you choose the lesser of two evils, you are still choosing evil.

Ferris: Are you going to be as impractical as that? Rearden: The evaluation of an action as practical, Dr. Ferris, depends on what it is that one wishes to practice. Ferris: Haven't you always placed your self-interest above all else? Rearden: That is what I am doing right now.

Whenever there is a conflict between universal principles and self-interest, self-interest is likely to prevail.

There is no right life in the wrong one.

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil", it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.

If you give up what you want most for what you think you should want more, you'll end up miserable.

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

Maybe sometimes we don't do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don't want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it's dangerous. We're more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right.

One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.

I think everyone is always asking themselves, How is my work meaningful, how is my life meaningful? As I get older, I feel like who I am as a person and a citizen is more important than who I am in my work. But I do think it reframed slightly for me, how much I have to care about a project in order to want to do it. Sometimes, obviously, you have a take a job for money. But I think I'm quicker now when I get a script that's, say, borderline misogynist, I'm not going to go in for it. I'm thinking more about what I'm putting into the world.

I asked myself if I would kill my parents to save his life, a question I had been posing since I was fifteen. The answer always used to be yes. But in time, all those boys had faded away, and my parents were still there. I was now less and less willing to kill them for anyone; in fact, I worried for their health. In this case, however, I had to say yes. Yes, I would.

When I look back on it, I think, "Why didn't you stop the cruelty earlier?" To stand back was contrary to my upbringing and nature. When I stood back as a noninterfering experimental scientist, I was, in a sense, as drawn into the power of the situation as any prisoners and guards.

The right to do something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.