Peter Hitchens Quotes

There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.

What's distinctively shocking about Machiavelli is that he didn't care. He believed not only that politicians must do evil in the name of the public good, but also that they shouldn't worry about it. He was unconcerned, in other words, with what modern thinkers call 'the problem of dirty hands.'

One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.

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

A political career brings out the basest qualities in human nature.

But what will not ambition and revenge descend to?

Life is no longer a contest of great minds for great ends, but a pot house squabble.

We suppose mankind more honest than they are.

I can't always say that justice is always done in 'Game of Thrones.' It is not.

The world is made up of good and evil, and everybody has their own take, and everybody thinks they are on the good side, and a very few, select group of us will admit that we come from the dark side.

'House Of Cards' with Kevin Spacey - I love how it portrays humans in power as just like the rest of us - but even worse.

Our actions are neither so good nor so evil as our impulses.

I'm not sure everybody agrees with me. I guess a lot of people don't. We are living in a time that's as evil as any time that there has ever been.

There's evil in the world, all right. Being aware of it makes you a realist, not a paranoid.

There is no such thing as pure good or pure evil, least of all in people.

Drugs are nihilistic: they undermine all values and radically overturn all our ideas about good and evil, what is just and what is unjust, what is permitted and what is forbidden.

It is the generation of the unemphatic. Steal, kill, lie, fornicate, but beware of indulging with conviction.

So far as he is able, a prince should stick to the path of good but, if the necessity arises, he should know how to follow evil.

There was no more good or evil in this world than we imagine there to be, either out of greed or out of innocence. Or sometimes madness.

Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacherous game and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are bastards.

It isn’t hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.

We all like to think that the line between good and evil is impermeable--that people who do terrible things, such as commit murder, treason, or kidnapping, are on the evil side of this line, and the rest of us could never cross it. But the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram studies revealed the permeability of that line. Some people are on the good side only because situations have never coerced or seduced them to cross over.

Miserable creatures, thrown for a moment on the surface of this little pile of mud, is it decreed that one half of the flock should be the persecutor of the other? Is it for you, mankind, to pronounce on what is good and what is evil?

The world is a den of thieves, and night is falling. Evil breaks its chains and runs through the world like a mad dog. The poison affects us all. No one escapes. Therefore let us be happy while we are happy. Let us be kind, generous, affectionate and good. It is necessary and not at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world.

The good, we do it; the evil, that is fortune; man is always right, and destiny always wrong.