Gary Ackerman Quotes

I don't think good and evil are polarized.

I've learned a lot about good and evil. They are not always what they appear to be.

Everyone spends their lives trying to balance their world between good and evil.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

We can no more tolerate neutrality and benevolence toward every conceivable form of discourse, including that of magical thinking, than we can lump together executioner and victim, good and evil.

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.

It doesn't make sense to have to do the wrong thing in order to do the right thing.

What 'True Blood' does really well is that it balances on the line between good and evil - you blur the distinction between the two.

We always want to find good and bad guys, and I don't believe in that.

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.'

I don't believe that there's a good guy and a bad guy. Unless it's like Superman or Batman, there is no good guy and bad guy.

Life isn't one-dimensional. The world isn't simply divided into good versus evil. I think we're all capable of both.

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days…. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

Of God and Evil, there is nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common Rule of Good and Evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves.

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

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.

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.

Tolerance obviously does not disturb the distinction between right and wrong, or good and evil.

As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.

The eternal conflict of good and the best with bad and the worst is on.

I think evil is very relative.

Anytime there's a God, there has to be a devil. And anytime there's good, there has to be evil. And the evil sometimes is the best!

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

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

This is a struggle of good and evil. And we're the good.