Contrasting Values Quotes

There are heroes in evil as well as in good.

I always felt growing up that in the South there was evil but also good - so much good.

If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.

If that for which the Spanish Empire has stood since the days of Charles V is right, then everything for which the United States stands and has always stood is wrong.

I am more than proud to be European. I love Europe, I love France, but I have an American mentality, and I don't know why. The way I see things, the way I talk, I'm the kind of person who, if I want to say something, I will say it - sometimes in Europe, it's not always what you need to do.

Evil borders upon good, and vices are confounded with virtues; as the report of good qualities is delightful to a well-disposed mind, so the relation of the contrary should not be offensive.

Most Americans, I don't think, could fathom the society that I grew up in. It is a completely different philosophy from America's. You are basically told what you can be by the educational system.

I'm a Tennessean at heart, and a New Yorker in spirit.

People say that love is the best thing in the world not power. But they are wrong. Love is the opposite of power and that's why we fear it so much.

The Bible is a sanctum; the world, sputum.

Truth stood on one side and Ease on the other; it has often been so.

How can you be a vegetarian atheist and own a gun? Well, that's who I am.

But, irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious people, these elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes. It was strange to see that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints.

Is that weird, taking my Louis Vuitton bag camping?

The Americans at heart are a pure and noble people; things to them are in black and white. It's either 'rawk' or it's not. We Brits putter around in the grey area.

I was raised as a Christian, where all you're taught is to be humble, even if you did something right. Politics is the complete opposite of: you do something a little nice, and you tell everyone.

The country and culture commonly known as "America" had had a badly split personality all through its history. Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apollonian in varying degrees---its religious revivals were often hysterical in a fashion almost Dionysian.

Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.

There appears to be but two grand master passions or movers in the human mind, namely, love and pride. And what constitutes the beauty or deformity of a man's character is the choice he makes under which banner he determines to enlist himself. But there is a strong distinction between different degress in the same thing and a mixture of two contraries.

America is a country in which I see the most persistant idealism and the blandest of cynicism and the race is on between its vitality and its decadence.

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

The people on my mum's side of the family are atheist intellectuals who are ueber-proper. My dad's side of the family are missionaries who are more comfortable sitting around in sweatpants than they are in a five-star restaurant. But those two influences converged in my life.

My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.

Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.

Whatever I thought right, to others seemed wrong; what I held to be bad, others approved of.