“There are only shades of gray. Black and white are nothing more than lofty ideals in our minds, the standards by which we try to judge things, and map out our place in the world in relevance to them.”

“A world of contradictions, wherein everything is gray and almost nothing is black and white.”

“When we are customarily annoyed by what we see as the failings of others, we are judging them by a ludicrous standard: we are assuming that they fully understand our desires, quite possibly better than we do, and that they have nothing to do but arrange things to fall seamlessly into place around our probably ill-communicated wishes.”

“Military men! Damn it, they always thought in terms of hardware, black or white, our side or the other side. It was damned hard to get them to see gray at all, and getting them to tell dark gray from medium gray was impossible!”

“People don't change. There are two kinds of people in the world: winners and losers. Black and white. I don't know where gray fits in, or if you can even live in that shade.”

“There’s so much gray to every story—nothing is so black and white.”

“I believe that in judging our actions we are more severe than professional judges. We judge not only our actions, but our thoughts, our intentions, our secret curses, our hidden hate.”

“The world isn't black and white, Annie, it's shades of grey.”

“Of the inhabitants then of worlds other than our own we can know still less having no standards by which to appraise them.”

“I have discovered with advancing years that few things are entirely black or white, but more often different shades of grey.”