Moral crusaders with zeal but no ethical understanding are likely to give us solutions that are worse than the problems.

Dr. Lois Jolyon West was cleared at Top Secret for his work on MKULTRA. West’s numerous connections to the mind control network illustrate how the network is maintained, not through any central conspiracy, but by...

Integrity is never a given. It is a quality that can only be proven over time.

With its continued dismissal of the law of God in ethics, Fundamentalism expressed both a “spiritualized” form of situational ethics and a “Christianly submissive” statism.

A spirit of license makes a man refuse to commit himself to any standards. The right time is the way he sets his watch. The yardstick has the number of inches that he wills it...

You are already of consequence in the world if you are known as a man of strict integrity

Are your principles not engraved in all hearts, and in order to learn your laws is it not enough to go back into oneself and listen to the voice of one’s conscience in the silence...

I have something that I call my Golden Rule. It goes something like this: ‘Do unto others twenty-five percent better than you expect them to do unto you.’ … The twenty-five percent is for error.

The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used...

I would tell young journalists to be brave and go against the tide. When everyone else is relying on the internet, you should not; when nobody’s walking, you should walk; when few people are reading...

Blood makes lousy detergent.

ethics is not about platitudes, let alone tautologies, logic or mathematics, but about difficult choices – dilemmas.

Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.

With the death of what Sydney Smith described as rational religon and the proponents of what remains sending out such confusing and uncertain messages, all civilised people have to be ethicists. We must work out...

Science tries to record and explain the factual character of the natural world, whereas religion struggles with spiritual and ethical questions about the meaning and proper conduct of our lives. The facts of nature simply...

When we are prevented from attempting seemingly innocuous studies of cancer behavior in humans … we may mark 1966 as the year in which all medical progress ceased.

Religion, declares the modern man, is consciousness of our highest social values. Nothing could be further from the truth. True religion is a profound uneasiness about our highest social values.

The people who support and defend those accused of child sexual abuse indiscriminately, those who join organizations dedicated to defending people who are accused of child sexual abuse with no screening whatsoever to keep out...

You honor yourself by acting with dignity and composure.

It is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit

Scientific theories never dictate human values, but they can often cast new light on ethical issues. From a sexual selection viewpoint, moral philosophy and political theory have mostly been attempts to shift male human sexual...

People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since...

Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural life than one raised on a battery farm in England, people who wouldn’t think twice about buying something oven-ready become...

To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long – that is the sign of strong full natures in whom there is an excess of power to form,...

The whole interest of my reason, whether speculative or practical, is concentrated in the three following questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? (Critique of Pure Reason

The humanitarian philosophies that have been developed (sometimes under some religious banner and invariably in the face of religious opposition) are human inventions, as the name implies – and our species deserves the credit. I...

It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of...

Animals are more than ever a test of our character, of mankind’s capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship. We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have...

The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death. There is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions...

Just as Man developed morals and ethical behavior over thousands of years of evolution; so, too, did he invent an authority figure to enforce these behaviors – God.

I had no idea what humans were capable of. I heard they were crafty, but how are they able to do such things?You mean harness light and water? Speedy asked. Change the weather?Yes.It’s only the...

Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people...

The best way to destroy the decrepit is to build the glorious.

It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the...

Our environment encourages us not to be philosophers but partisans.

In the newspapers the row about the prospect of genetically modified food raged on, and yet here were consumers effectively demanding lambs with four back legs.

It’s daft, locking us up,” said Nanny. “I’d have had us killed.””That’s because you’re basically good,” said Magrat. “The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.

The superstitious know how to reproach people for their vices better than they know how to teach them virtues, and they strive, not to guide men by reason, but to restrain them by fear, so...

I don’t want to accidentally end up looking back on my life to find that I’m ashamed of myself, I want to live a life I can be proud of.

The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that...

I want to stand on the foundation of ethics and morals when the world around me would assault that foundation with all of its collective might, and in the standing I want to stand on...

Concerns about ethics tend to be episodic, and those episodes are stimulated when there are horror strikes. And, of course, Tennessee Waltz was a real horror story.

The inconsistencies that haunt our relationships with animals also result from the quirks of human cognition. We like to think of ourselves as the rational species. But research in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics shows...

If you can’t see the feelings in a donkey, a ship, or a delicate tool, then it’s just as easy to not see them in your brother or sister when you can profit by treating...

One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. “Good” is no longer good when one’s neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a “common good”! The term contradicts itself: whatever...

If you don’t have integrity, you have nothing. You can’t buy it. You can have all the money in the world, but if you are not a moral and ethical person, you really have nothing.

Ethics”, and I said, Sure, I might enjoy a bit of stand-up comedy.

Most of us believe that eating meat is natural because humans have hunted and consumed animals for millennia. And it is true that we have been eating meat as part of an omnivorous diet for...

Markets cannot meet the needs of the very poor. The desperately poor are not consumers who will create an immediate profit.

Can you hold a red-hot iron rod in your hand merely because some one wants you to do so? Then, will it be right on your part to ask others to do the same thing...