Philip Pullman Quotes

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. This isn’t a good idea. This isn’t right.” “There’s all kinds of right,” he murmured. “On the spectrum, we’re still in the safe zone.” ... “Definitely right. Usually right,” Patch continued. “Mostly right. Maybe right.

I think the human race needs to think about killing. How much evil must we do to do good?

Everyone spends their lives trying to balance their world between good and evil.

It's the dualistic ways of looking at things that produces the evil.

Good and evil lay side by side.

Evil is a really tough concept for me. The idea of a villain that is bad for bad's sake seems kind of absurd.

In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which.

The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.

Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.

Kill a man who needs killing, and sometimes others pay for it. The question is, was it worth doing it anyway? There's always a balance, you know. Good and evil. Light and Shadow. We would not be human if there wasn't a balance.

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

You cannot talk about evil without assuming a moral framework.

Inability to tell good from evil is the greatest worry of man's life.

In philosophy seminars, the choice is usually between good and evil. In the real world, however, the choice is often between a bad guy and a worse guy.

As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

I have an interest in understanding evil. Who is the bad guy - the vampire who kills people and sucks their blood, or the survivalists who kill people to save their own lives? Is evil merely a creation of people? Or is there an evil nature? Or is it in the eye of the beholder? I really like these questions.

The true knowledge of good and evil arouses disturbances of the mind

If this isn’t good versus evil, what is?

The ends do not justify the means. The means are the ends.

You have more real truth to draw from if you are playing evil. We see so much of it around us in our culture, and we also have so much of it in our nature, which we are always warring against, as it were.

And one of the elders of the city , said , speak to us of good and evil. And he answered : You are good in countless ways , and you are not evil when you are not good .

It’s true that someone will always say that good and evil don’t exist: that is a person who has never had any dealings with real evil. Good is far less convincing than evil, but it’s because their chemical structures are different. Like gold, good is never found in a pure state in nature: it therefore doesn’t seem impressive. It has the unfortunate tendency not to act; it prefers, passively, to be seen.

I have never obtained any ethical values from my scientific work.

Should I be the one to play God? We're both about the same age, but we grew up in different neighborhoods.