Nuanced Morality Quotes

Nobody is all good or bad.

A character is never entirely white or black, there's never entirely right or wrong. You have to realize sometimes you face something, and then you change your mind, or then you realize you were wrong.

As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate. I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy.

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.

The myth of Good Guys and Bad Guys is one of the most pervasive we own, and morally grey anti-heroes are simply one of modern fiction's attempts to shake off that mythology and replace it with something a bit more honest.

People are now looking at the world in terms of axis of evil and evil-doers and by logical extension good-doers, and that's a very polarised look at good and bad people. Reality is much more complex than that and people can be good and evil on the very same day.

Sometimes even when the book is over I don't know who's good and who's bad. It's really more interesting, I think, to write about gray characters than it is to write about black and white.

No one is entirely good or evil; that is what the Warrior thinks when he has a new opponent.

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

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.

I think actually any morality system that rewards only the extremes is a flawed system. Players don't approach life that way, they don't approach games that way, and they shouldn't be trained to approach games that way. They shouldn't be in the mode where, "I've got to choose every good option." They should just play the game. And they should get equal consequences or rewards for that, that are different from the extremes.

At least you used to know 'there's the villain, there's the good guy', but today there are more shades of grey.

The bad guys are not typical; they are not just bad, they are interesting. They might be good or bad.

I think, actually, any morality system that rewards only the extremes is a flawed system. Players don't approach life that way, they don't approach games that way, and they shouldn't be trained to approach games that way. They shouldn't be in the 'Star Wars' mode where, 'I've got to choose every good option.'

We all are who we are. We're not necessarily good, and we're not necessarily bad. So much television, in the writing, is so one-dimensional, in that aspect, where you have your good guys and you have your bad guys.

Unalloyed heroes and unalloyed villains make me suspicious.

None of us are good or evil, and that frustrates us because we want to see others as wearing a white hat or black hat. My hat is grey.

We try to do that for stories - we try to say, 'OK, here's the message, here's the theme, here's the good people and the bad.' Life is not nearly like that.

I think if you read the story as bad guy turns good guy, then clearly it is a cliché. But my experience, when I spent three years working with young people in the townships on issues principally around HIV/AIDS, is that people are usually neither entirely good or bad. They are usually variations of both. Just because someone is a carjacker doesn't mean they are a ruthless cold-blooded murderer.

The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match.

In books, the truth makes everything good and fine. The good prevail. The wicked are punished. There is happiness. But it's not like that really, is it?" "No," I say. "I suppose it only makes everything known.