Anna Politkovskaya Quotes

The foundations of society have cracked as a result of the revolutionary reforms....The definitions and boundary lines of good and evil have disappeared.

For that which all men then did virtue call, Is now called vice; and that which vice was hight, Is now hight virtue, and so used of all: Right now is wrong, and wrong that was is right

Everything is blurred on what's right and what's wrong ... Sin becomes fine. Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men. Don't be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers - they won't inherit the kingdom of God.

God is the creator of all things, right? He is the force that dictates the laws of the universe, and is therefore the ultimate source of ethics. He is absolute morality... We claim to be doing good. But the Lord Ruler - as God - defines what is good. So by opposing him we're actually evil. But since he's doing the wrong thing, does evil actually count as good in this case?

Disregard for the consequences and for right and wrong nowadays passes as energy.

I wonder whether our adoption of Shrink-ese as a second language, the move from religious phrases of judgment to secular words of acceptance, hasn't also produced a moral lobotomy. In the reluctance, the aversion to being judgmental, are we disabled from making any judgments at all?

People drift from generation to generation, and the morally unthinkable becomes thinkable as the years move on.

I worry that when you start quoting Machiavelli to justify your actions, you have ceased to be one of the good guys. No, quoting Nietzsche does that. Machiavelli is just cool.

Tolerance once meant that we could use our reason to discern good and evil in open debate. Today tolerance has been used to call good evil and evil good.

When I see big movies that are only about good versus evil, and the good guy wins, I only can think we're in a far more complicated world than that. I frankly think that this binary philosophy is actually a dangerous way to look at the world.

Evil to some is always good to others

When a leader encourages the culture of impunity, the society is lost and it makes the work harder for the rest of us.

The moment one begins to solder right and wrong together, one's conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.

I'm not sure everybody agrees with me. I guess a lot of people don't. We are living in a time that's as evil as any time that there has ever been.

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

People do things in the names of good, and in the name of ideals, but the world isn't that simple. So they end up doing things that aren't necessarily good. Even if they think they're doing the right thing, but when viewed from a different perspective they can look barbaric and crazy.

Moral principles have lost their distinctiveness. For modern man, absolute right and absolute wrong are a matter of what the majority is doing.

You got men who can't hold peace and women who can't control their tongues. The rich seduce the poor, and the old seduce the young.

Since all things are good, men fail at last to distinguish which is the bane and which the antidote.

At least you used to know 'there's the villain, there's the good guy', but today there are more shades of grey.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. Now, Heaven knows, anything goes. The world has gone mad today, and good's bad today, and black's white today, and day's night today.

So you see, Good and Evil have the same face; it all depends on when they cross the path of each individual human being.

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.

The line between good and evil is movable and it's permeable.

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.