I once had a published written debate with a religious apologist who, after I had argued the standard line that the idea of a loving and merciful deity is inconsistent with the fact of natural evil, said this meant his god was not all-powerful, and t...
Right and wrong are superstitions; your desires, however, are real. Those who cannot achieve their desires, or who despair of doing so, often compensate by constructing imaginary frameworks. For example, if you wish to live in a world in which no one...
I love to see heroes who fuel some kind of moral furnace inside them, who are driven to take on the evils of the world, despite the fact that the evils of the world are more powerful than them. And essentially can never be defeated, but they refuse t...
So maybe the difference isn't language. Maybe it's this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous,...
I am beyond good and evil at this point. I am beyond the lines drawn in the sand by society at this juncture. I am beyond fear, beyond religion, beyond the morals and mores. I am Lord of the Fucking Flies. Do you understand?
... if we adopt the principle of universality: if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us. Those who do not rise to the minimal moral level of applying to themselves the standards they apply to others -- more stringent...
Nobody's born evil. I guess that's why we're drawn to violence. We're fascinated by it, but there's a moral in how you examine it.
What happens when good people are put into an evil place? Do they triumph or does the situation dominate their past history and morality?
In morals what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.
We want to believe in the essential, unchanging goodness of people, in their power to resist external pressures, in their rational appraisal and then rejection of situational temptations. We invest human nature with God-like qualities, with moral and...
Just as there are two sides to every story, there are two sides to every person. One that we reveal to the world and another we keep hidden inside. A duality governed by the balance of light and darkness. Within each of us is the capacity for both go...
This story has no moral. If it points out an evil at any rate it suggests no remedy.
I tend to think of action movies as exuberant morality plays in which good triumphs over evil.
And those characters [in a fairy tale] dwell in a moral world, whose laws are as clear as the law of gravity. That too is a great advantage of the folk tale. It is not a failure of imagination to see the sky blue. It is a failure rather to be weary o...
Moral evil is the immorality and pain and suffering and tragedy that come because we choose to be selfish, arrogant, uncaring, hateful and abusive.
If you say there is no such thing as morality in absolute terms, then child abuse is not evil, it just may not happen to be your thing.
I was never much bothered about moral questions like, 'How could there be a good God when there's so much evil in the world?'
Evil is a source of moral intelligence in the sense that we need to learn from our shadow, from our dark side, in order to be good.
One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.
If you spend your life on a moral hill-top, you see nothing but the mud below. If, like me, you live in the mud itself, you get a damned good view of clear blue sky and clean green hills above. There's none so evil-minded as those with a moral missio...
Monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, ...
