Joseph Addison Quotes

History is not the story of heroes entirely. It is often the story of cruelty and injustice and shortsightedness. There are monsters, there is evil, there is betrayal. That's why people should read Shakespeare and Dickens as well as history ~~ they will find the best, the worst, the height of noble attainment and the depths of depravity.

That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.

To say of shame - what is it? Of virtue - we can miss it; Of sin-we can kiss it, And it's no longer sin.

The evils of mortals are manifold; nowhere is trouble of the same wing seen.

All things truly wicked start from an innocence.

The best men are not consistent in good--why should the worst men be consistent in evil?

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.

We have to know that the bad guys are not different from us in the world.

All my books are an inquiry into the nature of evil. Why do good people do bad things? Are any human beings completely evil? Do we all have good within us? That's what I'm interested in.

I'm not an evil person. Nobody's really evil.

People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that.

I went looking for embodiments of pure evil, but found ordinary people.

When the soul hears no other calls than those of the sweet chaos of daily good and evil.

Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.

Tragedy should remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity. To them it is salvation and beatification.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes.

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.

I oscillate between life and death, happiness and sadness, good and evil.

Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon . . . is not the dragon the hero of his own story?

The anti-hero or hero usually has a journey or quest so they are interesting as you find out what's going to happen, what they are looking for. What are they trying to do? Sometimes what they do is heroic or comes with a price or sacrifice or maybe the way they do things isn't so great and that's when they become anti-heroes. But the journey of an anti-hero combined with a good story done well is always worthwhile.

Why should some people have such a hard time during their few years on this earth?

In other films and TV shows, we might say, "Well, they're just evil." In our show [Daredeval], we're trying to say, "There's bad actions, but not necessarily bad people."

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 are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.

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.