Barbara Tuchman Quotes

Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?

Terms like 'good' and 'bad' are extremely simplistic in what is a far more complex situation.

Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, 'I'm a bad guy.' They think they're the right guy.

Everybody is grappling with their own moral compass, and that needle, like any needle, can't just stick. It's always floating a little bit, and depending on where you're standing, it's hard to read.

I don't believe so much in good and evil.

Good and bad are not really relevant to me.

There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain't nice, but that's as far as any man got a right to say.

They all deserve to die. Even you, Mrs. Lovett Even I. Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief For the rest of us death would be relief.

We can assume that most people, most of the time, are moral creatures. But imagine that this morality is like a gearshift that at times gets pushed into neutral. When that happens, morality is disengaged. If the car happens to be on an incline, car and driver move precipitously downhill. It is then the nature of the circumstances that determines outcomes, not the driver's skills or intentions.

You know how confusing the whole good-evil concept is for me.

Moral sensibilities are nowadays at such cross-purposes that to one man a morality is proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it.

I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.

Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.

I don't think there is a right or wrong anymore. Only horrible and not-quite-so-horrible.

There's this whole sense of judgment and who's right and who's wrong and who's moral and who's going to be punished.

Moral: It all depends.

I cannot imagine any crime worse than taking a life, can you? -It'd depend whose life.

We aren't the good guys, Anita. We're the necessary guys. -Edward

Virtue, I grant you, is an empty boast; But shall the dignity of vice be lost?

The cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values.

To say a thing is natural is to condone it, never to praise it.

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.

Virtue and vice, evil and good, are siblings, or next-door neighbors, Easy to make mistakes, hard to tell them apart.

I find most American films annoy me because their third act tends to be tying up loose ends and returning to moral values and killing the monster. I think most of the scripts I read to tend to go in that direction and I find that very, very unsatisfying. I want the stories to have loose ends and to pose some questions - or even say things that aren't too comfortable.