Leo Tolstoy Quotes

History requires us to judge the figures of the past not by our moral standards but by those of the ages in which they lived and worked.

I don't believe so much in good and evil.

Good and bad are not really relevant to me.

Moral principles have lost their distinctiveness. For modern man, absolute right and absolute wrong are a matter of what the majority is doing.

Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.

So you can't judge the character you're playing ever.

Fantasy is an area where it is possible to talk about right and wrong, good and evil, with a straight face. In mainstream fiction and even in a good deal of mystery, these things are presented as simply two sides of the same coin. Never really more than a matter of where you happen to be standing.

Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about the past are a form of injustice.

Once you depart from the Ten Commandments as being the foundation of right and wrong, you are in a free fall.

Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.

I have an interest in understanding evil. Who is the bad guy - the vampire who kills people and sucks their blood, or the survivalists who kill people to save their own lives? Is evil merely a creation of people? Or is there an evil nature? Or is it in the eye of the beholder? I really like these questions.

There must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.

I always end up taking people that are morally ambiguous.

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

Wrong is for other people.

I love the gray area between right and wrong.

I've yet to meet a person in my life who doesn't have some moral ambiguity.

People's character is their behaviour - we're all capable of good and evil.

Our concerns aren't always appropriate or morally elevated.

I didn't grow up with any concept of people being deviants unless they mistreated others.

I like to see the difference between good and evil as kind of like the foul line at a baseball game. It's very thin, it's made of something very flimsy like lime, and if you cross it, it really starts to blur where fair becomes foul and foul becomes fair.

Because of the diverse conditions of humans, it happens that some acts are virtuous to some individuals … while the same acts are immoral for others …

Treason is not own'd when 'tis decried; Successful crimes alone are justified.

We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.