Phyllis Bottome Quotes

Conscience is known to be adequate in individuals; in large numbers little is to be expected of it.

I feel that bad people exist everywhere. I've always maintained that it is not the industry that is good or bad: it's the people.

There are bad people and there are bad corporations. Just as there are good people and good corporations. That might seem too black and white, but what can I tell ya?

Even if people do wrong, we're social animals, so what can we do about stopping them doing the same things in future? Saying people are 'bad' or 'evil' is just an unwillingness to engage; an unwillingness to try to empathise. That sanctimonious attitude doesn't help anyone.

Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity.

I know but one code of morality for man whether acting singly or collectively. He who says I will be a rogue when I act in company with a hundred others, but an honest man when I act alone, will be believed in the former assertion, but not in the latter.

No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.

It seems eternally forgotten, that men, in their collective capacity as nations, may be, and often are, guilty of the same follies, faults, and crimes, that they can commit as individuals in the common relations of social life; that they may be just as ill-humored, or resentful, or unreasonable, or ferocious, or wicked; that their good or bad passions enter with them into cabinets, and senates, and public meetings, just as they do into drawing-rooms, or studies, or their family dining-rooms.

I think chalking up human behavior to evil lets us all off the hook too easily.

Obviously everybody is accountable for their own actions, and everybody has to make judgments based on their own conscience as to whether or not they believe what they were doing is right or wrong.

Evil, as evil, can never be chosen; and though evil is often the effect of our own choice, yet we never desire it but under the appearance of an imaginary good.

How can you hope to recognize good and evil for what they truly are if you have no belief in a moral authority greater than yourself?

And it is characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes family and a state.

Evil into the mind of god or man may come and go, so unapproved, and leave no spot or blame behind.

Let no man be sorry he has done good, because others concerned with him have done evil! If a man has acted right, he has done well, though along; if wrong, the sanction of all mankind will not justify him.

Good and evil keep very exact accounts... and the face of every man is their ledger.

Genius does not excuse evil.

Good and evil have nothing to do with gods. It has to do with us.

People do terrible things all the time, but we don’t regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things.

Don't misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.

Christian society is like a bundle of sticks laid together, whereof one kindles another. Solitary men have fewest provocations to evil, but, again, fewest incitations to good. So much as doing good is better than not doing evil will I account Christian good-fellowship better than an hermitish and melancholy solitariness.

As for academics, I do not see why their responsibilities as moral agents should differ in principle from the responsibilities of others; in particular, others who also enjoy a degree of privilege and power, and therefore have the responsibilities that are conferred by those advantages.

As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of good and evil?

All men are evil and will declare themselves to be so when occasion is offered.