Reid Hoffman Quotes

Life often presents us with a choice of evils, rather than of goods.

Choices of right or wrong are not presented to you in black and white. If they were, I'm sure most people would choose white.

I tell my students, if you ever become comfortable with your role as criminal defense lawyer, it's time to quit. It should be a constant source of discomfort, because you're dealing with incredible moral ambiguity, and you've been cast into a role which is not enviable.

We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.

People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that.

The other possibility was that there was no right thing to say, that the choice wasn't between right and wrong but between wrong, more wrong, and as wrong as you can get.

And they are beginning to realize that the world they live in is a place where the right thing is often hard, sometimes dangerous, and frequently unpopular.

I know the difference between right and wrong, and I can tell good from bad. But I also know that the more difficult decisions come when we have to choose between good and better. The toughest calls of all are those we have to make between bad and worse.

What were good and evil, really, but stupid categories? Stupid categories that restricted people and punished or rewarded them based on how they responded to their own natures, natures they really didn't have any way to control.

Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon . . . is not the dragon the hero of his own story?

I'm not sure everybody agrees with me. I guess a lot of people don't. We are living in a time that's as evil as any time that there has ever been.

Every act has both good and evil results. The best we can do is lean to the light.

In other films and TV shows, we might say, "Well, they're just evil." In our show [Daredeval], we're trying to say, "There's bad actions, but not necessarily bad people."

I think people are screw-ups, and even our greatest heroes are deeply flawed human beings. People make bad decisions for all the wrong reasons, and then somehow they'll do the right thing, and then somehow they'll save somebody, or they'll be compassionate. Horrible people can do wonderful things, and wonderful people can do horrible things.

There's always the question of what is good and evil and the gray area in between where that most people live. In everyday life, things aren't black or white, but rather there's a lot of coping and really tough decision making.

Moral issues rarely have yes or no answers. -Myles to Alanna when she asks about the Gift

You can choose who you want to be the hero [in Hard Candy], but youll be second-guessing yourself -- theres just no right answer. Our society is obsessed with finding good and finding evil, but I think were all capable of anything.

All of the films I have made, that I have chosen to make, are all about the thin line between good and evil. And also the thin line that exists in each and every one of us. That's what my films are about.

Where there is a choice of two evils, most men take both.

The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.

Half of the results of a good intentions are evil; half the results of an evil intention are good.

There is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners. The contemporary world, with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters, demands that we confront every form of polarization which would divide it into these two camps.

We all like to think that the line between good and evil is impermeable--that people who do terrible things, such as commit murder, treason, or kidnapping, are on the evil side of this line, and the rest of us could never cross it. But the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram studies revealed the permeability of that line. Some people are on the good side only because situations have never coerced or seduced them to cross over.

I find it most remarkable that we who are so intimately involved in the battle between good and evil are even more involved with the shades of gray in between them.

The only boring part of it is finding the fact that got you from point A to point B. Most actors, if they're being honest, are not going to say that that's the most stimulating acting work they've ever done. But the dynamics of staring into the face of evil and it looking back at you, and seeing yourself in that or not, is interesting.