Mark Twain Quotes

The evil that we know is best.

Be good only if being bad ain't more fun.

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

The greatest incitement to guilt is the hope of sinning with impunity.

If vices were profitable, the virtuous man would be the sinner.

I consider myself a fairly ethical individual while I do have a lot of dichotomies within me. We're all victims of our own hypocrisy at times.

I think goodness is very powerful, but often evil is made more attractive in films. It's a challenge to make goodness appealing.

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.

Little evil would be done in the world if evil never could be done in the name of good.

Whether it's corporate investigations or comedy, there are certain inherent truths to trying to get what you want while trying to be a decent person doing it.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.

Invite characters of surprising and moral character, or at least those who grapple with what is right or those who make decisions that shock.

Necessity makes an honest man a knave.

Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty.

Gee, I wish that life were so black and white that you can't think of a single person who, you know, a good person who has done bad things.

Right is what you should do, wrong is what you really want to do.

Every nation necessarily inhabits a morally compromised space. All too often our ideals seem to be held to ransom by what we believe, rightly or wrongly, to be objective reality.

Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.

I know the difference between right and wrong, and I can tell good from bad. But I also know that the more difficult decisions come when we have to choose between good and better. The toughest calls of all are those we have to make between bad and worse.

Satan's snares are mostly subtly laid and are the most tempting when the dividing line between right and wrong is so thin as to be imperceptible.

The lowest standards of ethics of which a right-thinking man can possibly conceive is taught to the common soldier whose trade is to shoot his fellow men. In youth he may have learned the command, 'Thou shalt not kill,' but the ruler takes the boy just as he enters manhood and teaches him that his highest duty is to shoot a bullet through his neighbor's heart - and this, unmoved by passion or feeling or hatred, and without the least regard to right or wrong, but simply because his ruler gives the word.

In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which.

Evil, as evil, can never be chosen; and though evil is often the effect of our own choice, yet we never desire it but under the appearance of an imaginary good.

There are two kinds of people in this world, son. Those who save lives, and those who take lives." "And what of those who protect and defend? Those who save lives by taking lives?" "That's like trying to stop a storm by blowing harder. Ridiculous. You can't protect by killing.