Nikos Kazantzakis Quotes

You can compromise between good, better, and best, and you can compromise between bad and worse and terrible. But you can't compromise between good and evil. And now people look at the other side as a completely different kind of animal and say, 'They are taking the country down the road to purgatory.' It's complete intolerance.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

We've lost our sense of ethics; we live in a world of small-mindedness, of gratification without happiness and actions without meaning.

All universal moral principles are idle fancies.

We live in a world where everyone thinks they do the right thing, so they are entitled to do the wrong thing. So ends can justify the means.

I don't think anybody's all good or all bad.

When virtue is lost, benevolence appears, when benevolence is lost right conduct appears, when right conduct is lost, expedience appears. Expediency is the mere shadow of right and truth; it is the beginning of disorder.

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.

At the descriptive level, certainly, you would expect different cultures to develop different sorts of ethics and obviously they have; that doesn't mean that you can't think of overarching ethical principles you would want people to follow in all kinds of places.

The moral man is necessarily narrow in that he knows no other enemy than the 'immoral' man. 'He who is not moral is immoral!' and accordingly reprobate, despicable, etc. Therefore, the moral man can never comprehend the egoist.

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

There is but one right, and the possibilities of wrong are infinite.

If right were really right it would differ so clearly from not right that there would be no need for argument.

Truth is not half way between right and wrong;

If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Nazism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities.

Modern man has so long preached a doctrine of false tolerance; he has so long believed that right and wrong were only differences in a point of view, that now when evil works itself out in practice he is paralyzed to do anything against it.

A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right and evil doesn't become good, just because it's accepted by a majority.

There are many religions, but there is only one morality.

I want to give moral relativism the good spanking it deserves.

If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will.

Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver.

Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.

To God all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right.

The more immoral we become in big ways, the more puritanical we become in little ways.