Eric Johnson Quotes

'Evil' is quite a blanket term. People aren't the demonic characters we would like them to be sometimes.

I think chalking up human behavior to evil lets us all off the hook too easily.

The way I look at humanity, I don't think there's good guys or bad guys. We're all potentially bad and potentially good.

Men are not altogether bad or altogether good.

I personally feel that no human is a hero or a villain. All of us have our grey sides, and that is why grey interests me: because it's more human, more life-like.

I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Yuck, yuck, yuck, I'm gonna be evil."

Men do monstrous things but if you call a man a monster you have absolved yourself of blame. You don't have to think that you might ever do these things. I don't think that's true

I don't write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things that people do.

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested.

I don't think most people are all heroic or all villainous, so I find ambiguity of motivations to be a natural human condition.

I have a controversial opinion about evil, because I don't believe evil exists. I believe that actions are dark and destructive but I don't believe evil is a thing. I believe it's a by-product of man's fear and desperation.

People have their complexities. They have their heroic moments and their villainous moments, too.

Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with man is man.

I think all of us, under certain circumstances, could be capable of some very despicable acts. And that's why, over the years, in my movies I've had characters who didn't care what people thought about them. We try to be as true to them as possible and maybe see part of ourselves in there that we may not like.

There's always a theme I'm drawn to, that we humans are not good or bad. We're all a mixture of both. We can have great compassion or commit great violence.

The problem here is with a human being, not with a monster, not with an animal. The human being does things that even the monster does not do, because the human is more sophisticated.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.

Filmmakers tell stories to explore human nature, which is always a flawed thing.

If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.

The best men are not consistent in good--why should the worst men be consistent in evil?

I don't believe that pure evil exists, personally.

I try to show ugliness, but with compassion for the people who commit ugly acts.