Gray Area

“For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
– Hamlet

“Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored – contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man.”
– Abraham Lincoln

“Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.”
– Theodor Adorno

“It is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit.”
– Aristotle

“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.”
– Blaise Pascal, De l’art de persuader

“The earth is round and flat at the same time. This is obvious. That it is round appears indisputable; that it is flat is our common experience, also indisputable. The globe does not supersede the map; the map does not distort the globe.”
– Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“If you turn the other cheek, you can be enslaved for 1,000 years.”
– Malcolm X

“When you’re the victim of the behavior, it’s black and white; when you’re the perpetrator, there are a million shades of gray.”
– Laura Schlessinger

“In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic, or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.”
– Margaret Atwood

“The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.”
– Milan Kundera

“Finding consensus and common ground is dull! Nobody wants to watch a civilized discussion that acknowledges ambiguity and complexity. We want to see fireworks!”
– Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes

“Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.”
– Vincent van Gogh

“Sometimes it’s better to bend the law a little in special cases.”
– Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird

“You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.”
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome.”
– Douglas Adams