Gray Morality Quotes

I like grey characters; fantasy for too long has been focused on very stereotypical heroes and villains.

The cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values.

There is a certain kind of morality which is even more alien to good and evil than amorality is.

You learn eventually that, while there are no villains, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are therefore all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.

Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, And vice sometime's by action dignified

I love the gray area between right and wrong.

When a man declares: "There are no blacks and whites [in morality]" he is making a psychological confession, and what he means is: "I am unwilling to be wholly good - and please don't regard me as wholly evil!"

We want to live in the black and white, but we don't. The world is gray. And, I'm always fascinated by people who are clearly, 'This is black and this is white, and that's the way life is.' Life always has something to say about that.

One of the things about the '70s films I love - the films 'Nightcrawler' is being compared to, like, 'Taxi Driver' - is that they never put their flawed characters into any one box.

Most people are not good people. In business, in art, in almost every 'world' I've been in, most people I've meet are pretty gray to black. It takes practice to be the person who is a source of compassion and honesty.

I'm more fascinated by anti-heroes, and Gambit is one of those.

I believe you can make forces of good and evil work for you, to get what you want.

Be good only if being bad ain't more fun.

I'm interested in flawed protagonists. I was raised on them.

We pitched 'Sightseers' as a TV idea originally, and it was rejected because it was too dark. But then things like 'Dexter' came out, 'Breaking Bad'... There are so many sophisticated dramas now with comic elements to them.

If you think about it, just the psychology of the superhero is, 'Because I can, I should protect people, and I should put bad guys away, and I should defend society.' But you're forming your own justice. There's no judge and jury here: you are it. That, in and of itself, is a very complicated way of looking at morality.

Back in the '30s, '40s and '50s, you had clear-cut heroes, clear-cut supervillains. Today, you have more of a blend, more of a gray area between the two. You have the rise of the sympathetic villain and the rise of the antihero.

Life isn't black and white. It's a million gray areas, don't you find?

In all good westerns, the good guy is always a little bit questionable because he kind-of has to make moral judgments.

I don't like characters who are either good or bad. I just don't experience that in life, so my writing hasn't evolved that way.

In other films and TV shows, we might say, "Well, they're just evil." In our show [Daredeval], we're trying to say, "There's bad actions, but not necessarily bad people."

Normal people, who can be good people but do bad things, are very interesting to me, and people that never get a parking ticket or never do a bad thing in their lives can be really dangerous.

I had always thought that the 'good,' and the 'bad' and the 'violent' did not exist in any absolute, essential sense. It seemed to me interesting to demystify these adjectives in the setting of a Western. An assassin can display a sublime altruism while a good man can kill with total indifference.

Life is about the gray areas. Things are seldom black and white, even when we wish they were and think they should be, and I like exploring this nuanced terrain.

In a culture defined by shades of gray, I think the absolute black and white choices in dark young adult novels are incredibly satisfying for readers.