Ethical Gray Area Quotes

If I see something that's morally ambiguous or ambiguously beautiful or has some pull in some way, I won't censor myself; I always run towards the light.

We have secrets, and we have the same secrets that criminals have. Sometimes the only difference between a criminal and a law-abiding citizen is that somebody found out the criminal's secret.

A weapon isn't good or bad, depends on the person who uses it.

Occasionally, a man must rise above principles.

Nobody wants zealotry in a police force, you know? You do want to know that the guy who's got that badge, is confident enough to judge a certain level of benign corruption. Like a man steals some food to feed his starving children.

I know it's illegal [trespassing], but I don't think it's wrong.

So telling a lie becomes a sin if you tell it to take advantage of a person, but if you tell a lie to do a good thing for him that is not a sin. Even God tells lies very often; you can see this throughout history.

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.

Virtue, I grant you, is an empty boast; But shall the dignity of vice be lost?

There are times when the end justifies the means. But when you build an argument based on a whole series of such times, you may find that you've constructed an entire philosophy of evil." --Luke Skywalker

Life's not black-and-white. Sometimes the ends justifies the means.

As a writer, I've tried to avoid strong opinions about morality. You just want to present things as they are and let the viewer come to their own conclusion.

I like playing complex, interesting characters. Sometimes I don't think there's much of a strong line between right and wrong for a character. Every character is somewhere on a moral spectrum.

No villain thinks of himself as a villain, and that's the approach I always take.

I know how easy it is for one to stay well within moral, ethical, and legal bounds through the skillful use of words - and to thereby spin, sidestep, circumvent, or bend a truth completely out of shape. To that extent, we are all liars on numerous occasions.

Even when you make a tax form out on the level, you don't know when it's through if you are a crook or a martyr.

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

Certainly some things that are very good can sometimes be used in a bad way.

No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.

Desperate times require desperate measures. What Lincoln and the Lobbyist for the Amendment and the Manager of the Amendment and himself, what they did to get this passed was not illegal. It was murky, but what they did was noble and grand. How they went about it was somewhat murky. Nothing they did was really illegal.

Setting aside the vast herd which shows no definable character at all, it seems to me that the minority distinguished by what is commonly regarded as an excess of sin is very much more admirable than the minority distinguished by an excess of virtue. My experience of the world has taught me that the average wine-bibbler is a far better fellow than the average prohibitionist, and that the average rogue is better company than the average poor drudge, and that the worst white-slave trader of my acquaintance is a decenter man than the best vice crusader.

I have no problem twisting the facts if it's the only way I can be true to the moment.

Gray hats are the ones who think they're doing good, but they're not. You learn that when the FBI shows up on your doorstep.

Everybody says they're opposed to torture. But everyone would do it personally if they knew it could save the life of a kidnapped child who had only two hours of oxygen left before death. And it would be the right thing to do.