Graham Greene Quotes on Ethics
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Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.
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Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.
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The hurt is in the act of possession; we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad my wife had struck out at me again - I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.
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Sooner or later...one has to take sides - if one is to remain human.
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What right had I to value her less than the bodies in the square? Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel. I had judged like a journalist, in terms of quantity, and I had betrayed my own principles; I had become as engage as Pyle, and it seemed to me that no decision would ever be simple again.
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I have often noticed that a bribe...has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.
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If one is going to write about war, self respect demands that one.