Bret Easton Ellis Quotes

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

Everythings a choice. Nobody's born good. Nobody's born evil. It's always a choice.

Morality pertains only to the sphere of man's free will - only to those actions which are open to his choice.

Integrity in the Moment of Choice: Quality of life depends on what happens in the space between stimulus and response.

The world is evil only when you become its slave.

It is our choice of good or evil that determines our character, not our opinion about good or evil.

T is the will that makes the action good or ill.

Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

The power of choosing good and evil is within the reach of all.

No one is born evil; it's just the choices that they make.

In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason.

[Humans'] capacity to intervene, to compare, to judge, to decide, to choose, to desist makes them capable of acts of greatness, of dignity, and, at the same time, of the unthinkable in terms of indignity.

And does man simply choose evil, or does he create it?

The distinction between good and evil is meaningless if one does not have the freedom to choose between them.

Man has reason, discrimination and free-will such as it is. The brute has no such thing. It is not a free agent, and knows no distinction between virtue and vice, good and evil. Man, being a free agent, knows these distinctions, and when he follows his higher nature, shows himself far superior to the brute, but when he follows his baser nature can show himself lower than the brute.

Choice is the essence of ethics: if there were no choice there would be no ethics, no good, no evil; good and evil have meaning only insofar as man is free to choose.

I know there’s evil in the world, and there always has been. But you don’t need to believe in Satan or demons to explain it. Human beings are perfectly capable of evil all by themselves.

Eve didn't choose to eat the apple. She was tempted by the serpent." "Yes," I argue, thoughts coming out half-formed. "But...she didn't have to take a bite. She chose to.

Knowledge is power. Power to do evil...or power to do good. Power itself is not evil. So knowledge itself is not evil.

For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.

We do not what we ought; What we ought not, we do; And lean upon the thought That chance will bring us through; But our own acts, for good or ill, are mightier powers.

Nothing harms or destroys us but the wrong use of that liberty of choice which God has entrusted to us.

The world of evil is only as evil as we allow it to be.