Edgar Rice Burroughs Quotes

When virtue is at liberty, so to some extent is vice.

The power of choosing good and evil is within the reach of all.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be either good or evil.

The more...we consider man to be free, the less we can say, that he can neglect to use reason, or choose evil in preference to good

It is very questionable, in my mind, how far we have the right to judge one of another, since there is born within every man the germs of both virtue and vice. The development of one or the other is contingent upon circumstances.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

Christianity has aimed to deliver us from a life determined by nature, from the appetites as actuating us, and so has meant that man should not let himself be determined by his appetites.

The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to anyone who will take it of me.

Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

I suspect that here theists and atheists would agree: Human beings have within them the ability to choose evil or good. We wake up each day facing the age-old struggle of good and evil. In some situations, mental illness clouds our judgment.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

I've always felt like we're all human beings and we're all basically given the tools to make whatever choices we want to make. How we treat other people. How we treat ourselves. Just the whole philosophy of that and the philosophical logic of that is that we're all capable of great acts of evil, and we're all capable of great acts of good.

There is no rational creature which is not capable both of good and evil

To me, evil comes when you have a choice between that and good, and you choose the wrong way.

The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest.

No man deserves to be praised for his goodness, who has it not in his power to be wicked. Goodness without that power is generally nothing more than sloth, or an impotence of will.

Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

Pleasure itself is not a vice

Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

The will is truly free, when it is not the slave of vices and sins.

No intelligent man believes that anybody ever willingly errs or willingly does base and evil deeds; they are well aware that all who do base and evil things do them unwillingly.