Walter Lippmann Quotes

Longing and desire goes further than instant satisfaction. That's human nature.

I really want to be a villain.

People only hate what they see in themselves.

Loki in 'Thor' is the most incredible springboard into a sort of excavation of the darker aspects of human nature. So that was thrilling, coming back knowing that I'd built the boat and now I could set sail into choppier waters.

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

I would love to be a villain.

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

I may not be the devil, but I know just how he feels.

Natural villains are hard to come by, what with all the shrinks and social-scientist types threatening to understand everybody into the ground.

The thing that interests me is the good and evil in everybody. I don't have conventional heroes in the films that I directed, because I believe there's good and evil in everybody.

It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.

Evil gives you far more strings to pull. But I must say that I have never been interested in the psychology of evil, not in the slightest. Perhaps I'm not interested in evil, but in the dark sides of human beings.

Good and evil lie close together. Seek no artistic unity in character.

For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocence, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.

Shame is the turnkey that keeps our evil desires in jail.

Nature in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource.

The only boring part of it is finding the fact that got you from point A to point B. Most actors, if they're being honest, are not going to say that that's the most stimulating acting work they've ever done. But the dynamics of staring into the face of evil and it looking back at you, and seeing yourself in that or not, is interesting.

It is the evil that lies in ourselves that is ever least tolerant of the evil that dwells within others.

[C. Montgomery] Burns is much purer evil than Nixon was. I think it's the purity of his evil that attracts me as a comic character.

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.

I am going to tell you a secret. Everything is about wanting. Everything. Things happen because of people wanting. Watch closely, and you’ll see what I mean.

The cues that arouse desire are changed by Fashion, but feel like the proddings of Nature.

Man needs what's worst in him in order to achieve what's best in him.

I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Yuck, yuck, yuck, I'm gonna be evil." I think even like Saddam Hussein or Hitler would wake up and say, "I think it's going to be a good day. I'm gonna do some really important work." And given their definition of good, they went out and did horrible things.

Wickedness is always wickedness, but folly is not always folly.