H. L. Mencken Quotes

Nobody is all good or all bad.

I don't think most people are all heroic or all villainous, so I find ambiguity of motivations to be a natural human condition.

We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.

I don't think anybody's all good or all bad.

Men are not altogether bad or altogether good.

You cannot look at a person and tell whether they're good or bad.

I don't know if I've ever met anyone that's purely good or purely evil myself. I think most of us live with some varying degrees between the two.

I don't believe in good people and bad people.

I like playing human beings - I don't believe in good or bad. I don't believe in black and white. I believe in different tonalities. I believe in different layers of emotions and states of mind. I believe in characters that can be human.

Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place they're capable of anything.

There's no way to explain to a child that the line between good and evil isn't nearly as black and white as a fairy tale would lead you to believe. That an ordinary person can turn into a villain, under the right circumstances. That sometimes we dragon slayers do things we aren't proud of.

What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind-then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it's all as it should be.

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.

The world in all doth but two nations bear- The good, the bad; and these mixed everywhere.

There was no more good or evil in this world than we imagine there to be, either out of greed or out of innocence. Or sometimes madness.

The truth and regularity of a character is not, in justice, to be looked upon as broken, from any one single act or omission which may seem a contradiction to it:Mthe best of men appear sometimes to be strange compounds of contradictory qualities.

Contradiction is the heart and soul of character and drama. You're always looking for it. I loved her so much I hit her; that's character. I loved her so much I hit her again; that's even more character.

I used to think the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty. I’m still going through the motions.

It is an error common to many to take the character of mankind from the worst and basest amongst them; whereas, as an excellent writer has observed, nothing should be esteemed as characteristical, of a species but what is to be found amongst the best and the most perfect individuals of that species.

No one is anything but a shade of grey. It's good people making bad choices.

An entirely honest man, in the severe sense of the word, exists no more than an entirely dishonest knave: the best and the worst are only approximations of those qualities. Who are those that never contradict themselves? yet honesty never contradicts itself: Who are those that always contradict themselves? yet knavery is mere self-contradiction. Thus the knowledge of man determines not the things themselves, but their proportions, the quan∣tum of congruities and incongruities.

The problem of good and evil is not the problem of good and evil, but only the problem of evil. In opposition to good there are evil characters, but there are no good characters in opposition to evil. Evil is arguable, but good is not. Therefore the Devil always wins the argument.

Probably the greatest writer of westerns himself was Homer. His character were never all good or all bad. They're half and half, these characters, as all human beings are.

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.