Good and evil is not black and white,
but a million shades of grey
Minh Tan
You know, for a common analogy, there wasn’t a quote for it! I’ve had this for a while, though, formulated before the Internet really became widely accessible. I did it precisely because the general concept society sometimes talk about with good and evil being grey, rather than black and white, didn’t have an elegant quote for it. I still can’t find anything like it so I’m just sharing my version of it. Not saying it’s my original idea or anything. I just happen to have a working version I came up with on my own and was not able to find one like it.
And even if I did, I’m allowed to call my creation my own, right? 🙂
The sticking point in this quote is the word “million”. Complexity between good and evil is really infinite, theoretically. However, any human would be hard pressed to distinguish 1000 levels on a scale, never mind the million I’m choosing to use. Thousand is something ancient philosophers use when the world population was in the millions (or tens of millions) scale. We’re at 7 billion today, with a lot more issues at stake in a more complex world, so I thought millions was a fair compromise for a choice of scale. I could have gone to billions, sure, but besides a mathematical definition and some stats like China’s got over a billion people, how many people do you really think have any real grasp of what a billion of anything really means?
For grammatical sticklers, I did choose to use is after good AND evil, talking about them as a package for comparison like black and white. If you don’t like it, you can write the version with are and call it your own! 🙂
Digital Citizen 