Anne Bishop Quotes

I tried to walk a line between acting lawfully AND testifying falsely, but I now realize that I did not fully accomplish that goal.

Identify the moral dilemma driving the novel. the successful novel will haunt a reader because it deals with some ethical or moral dilemma that makes the reader wonder what he or she would do in the protagonist's place.

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.

How can you do the right thing when you can't figure out what that is? When all you have before you are choices in various shades of wrong?

One goal of ethical inquiry might be to uncover strategies available for use when values conflict or when rules are incomplete.

A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore.

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 see that the path of progress has never taken a straight line, but has always been a zigzag course amid the conflicting forces of right and wrong, truth and error, justice and injustice, cruelty and mercy.

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

I don't think any of us know how we would react until we were put in a situation where we have to do something bad or do something good. I think I'd like to believe I'd act like a decent human being, but I'm realistic to know I don't know.

Everybody is a hypocrite. You can't live on this planet without being a hypocrite.

It's easy to get into the grey zone [of ethics].

If this isn’t good versus evil, what is?

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.

What's stronger-the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?

Temptation is a suggested short cut to the realization of the highest at which I aim - not towards what I understand as evil, but towards what I understand as good.

It is great sin to swear unto a sin, But greater sin to keep a sinful oath.

I am doing the right thing, he told himself, so why do I feel so bad?

Every time I tried to express my most heartfelt desires to be morally good I met with contempt and ridicule; and as soon as I would give in to vile passions I was praised and encouraged. Ambition, love of power, self-interest, lechery, pride, anger, vengeance-all of it was highly esteemed.

History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics.

Men who have lost their conviction of what is good and what is bad find themselves without a sextant to check their position by. We are in the position of a man with an elaborate camping kit who finds himself lost in the woods without his matches; to kindle a fire he has to resort to the stratagems of the caveman. We fall back through generations into the oldest terrors and confusions of the race.

The love of property and consciousness of right and wrong have conflicting places in our organization, which often makes a man's course seem crooked, his conduct a riddle.

A pure heart won't get us out of conflict and controversy. It may well be the very thing that gets us into it.

Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community of nations only by courting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb.

Guilt is ever at a loss, and confusion waits upon it; when innocence and bold truth are always ready for expression.