by confusing life with play-acting and play-acting with life, one may perhaps construct a tolerable moral world from shattered fragments of the past

Stories don’t teach us to be good; it isn’t as simple as that. They show us what it feels like to be good, or to be bad. They show us people like ourselves doing right...

Justice is the only worship.Love is the only priest.Ignorance is the only slavery.Happiness is the only good.The time to be happy is now,The place to be happy is here,The way to be happy is to...

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

To act morally is not to act out of fear of punishment; it is not to act as one is commanded to act. Rather, it is to act as one ought to act. And how...

If laws were real they wouldn’t need to be enforced, because if they were real they couldn’t be broken. Try breaking the law of gravity. Now that’s a law. Laws made by man are rules...

Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human...

If you have money but not love you will somehow manage, but if you don’t have both then you are in serious trouble.

I can pretty much guarantee that you will at some point find yourself doing something that at one point you swore you’d never do. You’ll do it for the sake of getting high, either directly...

You can’t be spontaneous within reason.

I have gained this by philosophy … I do without being ordered what some are constrained to do by their fear of the law.

Families start out, most of the time, with unconditional acceptance of one another. That acceptance starts in childhood and continues into adulthood. Somewhere in there, between childhood and adulthood, the ability to distinguish right versus...

There has to be a cut-off somewhere between the freedom of expression and a graphically explicit free-for-all.

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.

Nada importa hace mucho que lo se, así que no merece la pena hacer nada eso acabo de descubrirlo.

It can have no bearing on the matter before us. Sam Westing manipulated people, cheated workers, bribed officials, stole ideas, but Sam Westing never smoked or drank or placed a bet. Give me a bookie...

How simple love would be, Younger Brother, if we only had to bestow it on those who deserved it. Yet what would it be worth? If you gave a poor man a silver coin then...

People have always wanted to ‘improve’ human beings; for the most part, this has been called morality.

Too many people get credit for being good, when they are only being passive. They are too often praised for being broadminded when they are so broadminded they can never make up their minds about...

The death of dogma is the birth of morality.

No man is such a legalist as the good Secularist.

I’ll leave you two alone. Morality might be contagious.-Captain Tagon

Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral.

1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning. There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan’s 127 million people...

Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than...

For, according to the teachings of Islam, moral knowledge automatically forces moral responsibility upon man. A mere Platonic discernment between Right and Wrong, without the urge to promote Right and to destroy Wrong, is a...

Wars are all fought by men who either believe they are right or who have no other choice. How they fight defines who they are when the blood stops flowing.

I wish I could make him understand that a loving good heart is riches enough, and that without it intellect is poverty.

The moral conscience that so many thoughtless people have offended against and many more have rejected, is something that exists and has always existed. It was not an invention of the philosophers of the Quartenary,...

Nature has made a mistake in the choice of my sexuality and I must do a life-long penance for it, for the moral power to suffer the unavoidable with dignity is lost.

One of the most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they...

Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over...

We live in the present all the time and the past does not matter anymore. Only if we can understand this in the past, when the past is the present, we would be able to...

Life is not interested in good and evil. Don Quixote was constantly choosing between good and evil, but then he was choosing in his dream state. He was mad. He entered reality only when he...

Sometimes I just need to be alone with what I believe in.

I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s...

The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We feel morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility...

Suppose it should turn out that no such person as Christ ever lived. What harm would that do justice or mercy? Wouldn’t the tear of pity be as pure as now, and wouldn’t justice, holding...

Oh, no. It costs a lot more than your life. To murder innocent people?” says Peeta. “It costs everything you are.

ACADEME, n. An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to...

We stay the same as we’ve always been, keeping to the path we’ve walked our whole lives. Paths that carry so much importance and perceived stability that we are utterly convinced it is the only...

And I bet you murdered Michael Wayland and his little boy, too. Threw their bones in with my grandparents’ so that my mother would think you and Jace were dead. Put your necklace around Michael...

To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.

That is the idea — that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for...

we (modern society) make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)

Simple life EthosIf you must judge. Let your moral beacon guide you to a decision you can live with,If you feel generous, give with humility so others could live with dignity,If you became aware of...

Peaceful disputes are maintained when men sincerely believe that they are morally, logically correct about the issues at hand. It is when neither side is really certain that wars are instigated.

And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any...