Everything done, even the most innocent in appearance, is already guilty, already corrupted; it is thrown into the unclean flow of formation and can never swim back against the current again.

Anything which deceives is evil, I believe.

It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all too soon, the very words "justice,"...

Did the little girl witness a murder? No. She stole a medal that was worth a suitcase full of money. Ranger raised his eyebrows and grinned. Good for her. I like to see enterprise in kids.

Fairness, he said, 'does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young.

Think your little jokes'll help you on your deathbed? she jeered. Jokes? No, no, these are manners, replied Dumbledore.

He says this is war. There is no shame in war. Tell him he's wrong. War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.

And this is what I want you to understand, that good, real good, was born out of your father's remorse. Sometimes, I think everything he did, feeding the poor on the streets, building the orphanage,...

Only thieves and children run.

Good to evil seems evil

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who...

Why do you think people cheat?," I asked."Because they're bored? Because they can? Because they're selfish and think they're entitled to anything they want? Because they don't think they'll get...

It is a fact verified and recorded in many histories that the soul capable of the greatest good is also capable of the greatest evil. Who is there more impious than a backsliding priest? Who more...

Apologizing for our past sins may reveal character and for a time lessen anti-Americanism abroad, but if it is done without acknowledging that the sins of America are the sins of mankind, and that our...

And then the strangest thought of all clattered drunkenly from the back of my brain to the front and blinded me: If I kill Amy, who will I be?

"The weapon is poison,' Kit said. 'I believe that the cause we carry it in is just, but that will not protect you. It is not only death to those whose skin it cuts; it holds a deeper violence within...

One does not have to be a priest to be a man!

An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental.

Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw...

The moral sense in mortals is the dutyWe have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.

There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules

I know the difference between right and wrong. I understand the rules. But today I feel that the rules have been blurred, because today they were literally on my front doorstep.

The crimes the law can understand are not the worst crimes.

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...

I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.

According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason,...

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it,...

Across the board... Not junkies or freaks, but people who were just as comfortable with drugs like weed, booze, or coke as we are - and we're not weird, are we? Hell no, we're just overworked...

Reforms will come as all great reforms have always come in ridding us of evils against both man and animal--not as we change our moral principles but as we discern and accept the implications of...

We can't have moral obligations to every single person in this world. We have moral obligations to those who we come up against, who enter into our moral space, so to speak. That means neighbors,...