Philip Zimbardo Quotes

Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.

As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate. I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy.

I purposefully try to make films in that grey area, where things are morally ambiguous. It's like life: good people do horrible things, and bad people do good things, and there's beauty in horror and horror in beauty.

We all are who we are. We're not necessarily good, and we're not necessarily bad. So much television, in the writing, is so one-dimensional, in that aspect, where you have your good guys and you have your bad guys.

Everyone spends their lives trying to balance their world between good and evil.

The thematic bucket of vomit that I've been chained to since I was about 9 is the moral complexity of anti-heroism. I have always been interested in good people who do bad things for understandable reasons.

There's good and bad in everybody. I wasn't looking for the good, or looking for the bad. This is a man who signed his pact with the devil 20 years ago, and he's learned to live with it. He's tried to protect his family from it.

Active Evil is better than Passive Good.

We've had crooks from the beginning of time... it's always very interesting and troubling why good people do bad things.

Even good people are obliged to deceive.

'Foyle's War' made me realise that Churchill actually had questionable morals; his decisions meant that good people died. It must have weighed heavily on his soul, but he never let his personal demons get in the way of what was best for our country.

If you've ever liked an artist or someone who then does something or is accused of something extremely corrupt, and your moral conscience won't allow you to accept that artist, the truth is then that creates a void in your life. Because then something you loved was taken from you.

When good people do bad things, it is sad, but when they reach the point where one can predict that they will do nothing but bad things, a deeper kind of sadness sets in, almost at the level of resignation.

When I sit down to write a novel, I am exploring my own relationship with God, with the struggle between good and evil, my own purpose.

Every man hath a good and a bad angel attending on him in particular all his life long.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

In all secrets there is a kind of guilt, however beautiful or joyful they may be, or for what good end they may be set to serve. Secrecy means evasion, and evasion means a problem to the moral mind.

'Breaking Bad' is great at blurring the line between good and evil. It makes you feel compassion for Walter White so you're with him throughout this descent into the darker parts of his psyche. The bad that we're capable of is all circumstantial.

The evil that we know is best.

A hero can only be as good as the bad guy.

It's much less interesting as an actor playing someone who's purely good or purely evil.

Inside each of us, there is the seed of both good and evil. It's a constant struggle as to which one will win. And one cannot exist without the other.

It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.

The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.

There is such a thing as doing good that evil may come.