Max Lerner Quotes

All wrong doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do.

Evil is knowing better, but willingly doing worse.

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

When you're a liar, a person of low moral fortitude, really any explanation you need to be true can be true. Especially if you're smart enough. You can figure out a way to justify anything.

No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.

A bad cause will ever be supported by bad means and bad men.

The human mind has infinite capacity to rationalize, and evil characters just push that boundary a bit. Whatever they're doing, they think it makes sense to do it, and they think they have a good reason to do it. In short, they feel justified.

Even the best-intentioned of great men need a few scoundrels around them; there are some things you cannot ask an honest man to do.

The history of the opium fight forms a queer illustration of our National blindness to our own faults, and emphasizes our National tendency to see with amazing clarity, the sins of others, while remaining blind to our own viciousness

Self-deception is so far from impossible that it is one of the most ordinary phenomena with which we are acquainted. Nothing is more usual than for a man to impute his actions to honorable motives when it is nearly demonstrable that they flowed from some corrupt and contemptible force.

I know that people are fascinated by what I did as a teenager, but what I did was immoral, illegal, unethical, and something that I am not proud of - nor will I ever be proud of.

I think I wear my hypocrisy on my sleeve. I would never say I'm not a complete hypocrite.

It's abhorrent to me that somebody is just evil, and you can't explain it.

I always tried to play the bad guys as guys who didn't know they were bad guys. There are villains we run into all the time, but they don't think they are doing anything wrong. If they do, they think they are cunning and smart. When people break laws and ethical rules, they justify it in their own terms.

Riches cannot be gathered without sin and evil means.

There are people in positions of power that are righteous about what they believe: they're enacting out evil principles, but they don't believe that that's what they're doing.

Every villain has their belief system that makes perfect sense to them.

Nobody sets out to be evil. They're insecure, and they make bad decisions.

When you think you're a really good person, you're actually capable of doing some real harm to people, either knowingly or unknowingly. It's the big little lie that we all live in.

I think almost anyone is capable of doing things that are evil or hurtful or harmful.

There's bad apples in every type of job, whether it's sports or normal day-to-day jobs.

I'm not satisfied with the term 'evil.' We've inherited this word... and we use it to express our abhorrence when people do awful things, usually acts of cruelty, but I don't think it's anything more than another word for doing something bad.

Evil is evil, and it doesn't discriminate by dress. Some evil people in the headlines wear designer suits and wing-tipped shoes.

Everybody knows that people cheat, but I don't.

Most of the bad guys in the real world don't know that they are bad guys. You don't get a flashing warning sign that you're about to damn yourself. It sneaks up on you when you aren't looking.