There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong,
but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect
for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in
the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no
choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle,
willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the
guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to
jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each
other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that
can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can
profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil,
the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube . . .
When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force
of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the
virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels—and you get the indecent spectacle of a
cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising
evil.