The Dangerous Side of Good Intentions Graham Greene was born on 2 October 1904. His novels rarely give us spotless heroes. More often, they give us people who do bad things for good reasons, occasionally good things for bad ones, and then try to live with whatever remains. Perhaps that is why *The Quiet American* has aged so well. Pyle is not evil. He is something rather more uncomfortable than that: "he is certain that he means well." History has always had a particular fondness for this kind of person. With a cynic, at least we know where we stand. An idealist, on the other hand, can save entire countries — even from having their own ideas about what they might actually need. Good intentions are not a crime. They are simply a surprisingly poor brake. Greene understood that seventy years ago. Since then, we have mainly improved the tools.