Moral Extremes Quotes

The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

Every virtue inclines to stupidity, every stupidity to virtue; "stupid to the point of sanctity," they say in Russia, - let us be careful lest out of pure honesty we eventually become saints and bores!

When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.

Either a beast or a god.

I take it to be from the greatest extremes, both in virtue and in vice, that the uniformly virtuous and reformed in life can derive the greatest and most salutary truths and impressions.

You've got to be good or as bad as the devil.

Not every action or emotion however admits of the observance of a due mean. Indeed the very names of some directly imply evil, for instance malice, shamelessness, envy, and, of actions, adultery, theft, murder. All these and similar actions and feelings are blamed as being bad in themselves; it is not the excess or deficiency of them that we blame. It is impossible therefore ever to go right in regard to them - one must always be wrong.

If a man has no vices, he is in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.

Two points of danger beset mankind; namely, making sin seem either too large or too little.

We are not angels. Nor are we the devils you have made us out to be.

Men at most differ as Heaven and Earth, but women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell.

Cruelty is the only sin.

Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver.

Man creates both his god and his devil in his own image. His god is himself at his best, and his devil himself at his worst.

I think actually any morality system that rewards only the extremes is a flawed system. Players don't approach life that way, they don't approach games that way, and they shouldn't be trained to approach games that way. They shouldn't be in the mode where, "I've got to choose every good option." They should just play the game. And they should get equal consequences or rewards for that, that are different from the extremes.

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

Even virtue followed beyond reason's rule May stamp the just man knave, the sage a fool.

One thing I love about Cormac McCarthy is the types of pressure he puts onto people. You see the best and the worst in people, you really see what humanity is made of, and I think that resonates in some way.

...religion either produces the very best people or the very worst.

We may so seize on virtue, that if we embrace it with an overgreedy and violent desire, it may become vicious.

Virtue is defined to be mediocrity, of which either extreme is vice.

We like our villains to be evil from head to toe.

Between these two, the denying of sins, which we have done, and the bragging of sins, which we have not done, what a space, what a compass is there, for millions of millions of sins!

Passions are vices or virtues to their highest powers.

For every Mother Teresa, there's a Jeffrey Dahmer.