Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

To do a great right do a little wrong.

The lives of the best of us are spent in choosing between evils.

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.

I killed one man to save 100,000.

Sometimes you have to do what’s wrong in order to do what’s right.

An injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice.

Revolting means for good ends make the ends of themselves revolting.

Every positive value has its price in negative terms... the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

The world, as transformed by this creative deed, is better than it would have been had all else remained the same, but had that deed of treason not been done at all.

Morality without a sense of paradox is mean.

Parts of you die with every decision you have to make. It becomes about making decisions between bad decisions and worse decisions.

Where great evils lie on all sides, it is very difficult to follow the best counsel.

Sometimes you need to make difficult choices.

Early in my career I had to be a goon to survive. I did everything I had to do and probably some things I shouldn't have.

The other possibility was that there was no right thing to say, that the choice wasn't between right and wrong but between wrong, more wrong, and as wrong as you can get.

I know the difference between right and wrong, and I can tell good from bad. But I also know that the more difficult decisions come when we have to choose between good and better. The toughest calls of all are those we have to make between bad and worse.

How can you do the right thing when you can't figure out what that is? When all you have before you are choices in various shades of wrong?

Sometimes good people have to do terrible things.

The lesser evil is also evil.

It was wrong. But it was worth it.

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil", it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.

Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort. Remember Cedric Diggory.

It is impossible to reign innocently.

To save our imperiled honor everything must be sacrificed, even virtue.

Many of us, whether in the jungles of Asia or on the streets of Chicago, had discovered that noble causes can lead to ignoble actions and that we were capable of sacrificing honor to a sense of efficacy.