"And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels."

Morality, Complexity, Behavior, Judgment

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"And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels."

Exlpore more Morality quotes

"The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary."

C. S. Lewis, British Author

Morality, Malice, Benevolence, Reality, Imagination

"We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own."

Jonathan Safran Foer, American Novelist

Morality, Suffering, Memory, Ethics, Animals

"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."

Gilbert K. Chesterton, English Writer

Morality, Action, Judgment, Ethics

"One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself Which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker, there is not other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Poet

Morality, Debt, Justice, Truth

"There are sins much more serious than socio-pathologies which really are mental illnesses, whereas self-righteousness is an illness of the soul."

R. Alan Woods, American Author

Morality, Sin, Truth, Wisdom

"Violence is not the answer. Terrorism is the most dangerous of answers."

Elie Wiesel, American Novelist

Morality, Violence, Terrorism, Conflict

"The Ten Commandments are the most visible symbol because these commandments are recognized by Christians and Jews alike as being the foundation of our system of public morality."

Pat Robertson, American Clergyman

Morality, Being, Public, Symbol

"On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time."

George Orwell, British Author

Morality, Humanity, Behavior, Limit

"Morality without a sense of paradox is mean."

Karl Schlegel, German Philosopher

Morality, Paradox, Sense

"The world won't be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything."

Albert Einstein, German Scientist

Morality, Evil, Action, Responsibility, Inaction

Explore more quotes by Philip Pullman

"Tolkien, who created this marvellous vehicle, doesn't go anywhere in it. He just sits where he is. What I mean by that is that he always seems to be looking backwards, to a greater and more golden past; and what's more he doesn't allow girls or women any important part in the story at all. Life is bigger and more interesting than The Lord of the Rings thinks it is."

Art

"The Specters feast as vampires feast on blood, but the Specters' food is attention. A conscious and informed interest in the world. The immaturity of children is less attractive to them."

Psychology

"You don't win races by wishing, you win them by running faster than everyone else does."

Success

"I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites."

Writing

"One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don't exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which the did happen."

Possibility

"I'm working on another Lyra book right now " it's called The Book of Dust.'It's going very well and it will be finished when I write the words 'The End'."

Art

"But suppose your dA mon settles in a shape you don't like?Well, then, you're discontented, en't you? There's plenty of folk as'd like to have a lion as a dA mon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they're going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling, that is.But it didn't seem to Lyra that she would ever grow up."

Personal

"Hope holds you fast like an anchor so you don't give way."

Inspirational

"You are dead- what am I speaking to?"

Philosophy

"We've heard them all talk about Dust, and they're so afraid of it, and you know what? We believed them, even though we could see that what they were doing was wicked and evil and wrong... We thought Dust must be bad too, because they were grown up and they said so. But what if it isn't? What if it's-'She said breathlessly, 'Yeah! What if it's really good..."

Curiosity