The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries, that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion. It has been the most...

The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.

Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes,...

Apart from the economic value, money does have high moral value.

Dream big dreams! Imagine that you have no limitations and then decide what’s right before you decide what’s possible.

Do right simply because it is right.

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less...

Any society’s upper-crust is riddled with immorality, how else d’you think they keep their power? Reputation is king of the public sphere, not private. It is dethroned by public acts.

Therefore, let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you.

Yet the same thing happens to the notions of morality. They are devised, at the start, as measures of expediency, and then given divine sanction in order to lend them authority.

There is, after all, no moral difference between the bigot and the tolerator. They are from case to case positive or negative. One man is bigoted because he was given the sword of truth, another...

My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

So many times the debate of abortion turns to legality. The issue is not legality, the issue is morality. Have you not forgotten? It was legal for Adolf Hitler to place all of those men,...

And a human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being...

Why are those who are notoriously undisciplined and unmoral also most contemptuous of religion and morality? They are trying to solace their own unhappy lives by pulling the happy down to their own abysmal depths.

Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.

A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.

Some Christians say god is the source of morality, these people have clearly never read the bible.

I have a very simple morality: not to do good or evil to anyone. Not to do evil, because it seems only fair that others enjoy the same right I demand for myself – not...

The primary reason more explicit material is now being published is twofold: there’s money in the sale of sensational material, and few are trying to stop those who want to make this money, that is,...

Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.

Every man who begets a free act projects his personality into the infinite. If he gives a poor man a penny grudgingly, that penny pierces the poor man’s hand, falls, pierces the earth, bores holes...

It still remains unrecognised, that to bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a...

True morality consists not in following the beaten track, but in finding the true path for ourselves, and fearlessly following it.

If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. (95)

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

There’s a saying that you can’t put a price on a human life, but that saying is a lie because we have. We have, and it’s so much lower than you would think. Yes, human...

Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.

morality means giving common concerns or the wellbeing of others as much weight as one’s own self-interest. Moral behaviour in this sense can be found in any society, because it is the glue that sticks...

Before I can say I am, I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too....

The law says you have the right to hold a nigger, but begging the law’s pardon, it lies. . . Is everything right because the law allows it? Suppose they’d pass a law taking away...

It’s not enough, and so limiting, to teach the simplistic value of a designer’s material wear. Give children the gift of values that will last far beyond [a] fad’s temporal popularity.

I believe in evil, but all my life I’ve gone back and forth about whether or not there’s an outside evil, whether or not there’s a force in the world that really wants to destroy...

I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for...

Even in Europe a change has sensibly taken place in the mind of man. Science has liberated the ideas of those who read and reflect, and the American example has kindled feelings of right in...

What version of Christ does he believe in?

I do not judge the individual based on their belief. If I were to, then I would, undoubtedly, be no better than the (religious) system that I frown upon.

Lástima por aquellos que prefieren dañar su integridad moral antes que quedarse solos.

Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.

The values most important to us are always the most easily exploitable.

As the sailor locates his position on the sea by “shooting” the sun, so we may get our moral bearings by looking at God. We must begin with God.

Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma...

[T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

the difference between the old and the new education being) in a word, the old was a kind of propagation – men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.

With Truth, Reason, and Morality off the board, we then capture their last Rook —that prissy little virtue, Temperance— for she depends on those other three for her beauty and was thus left wholly undefended.

War does not decide who is right but who is left.

The man who sins but wants to purify it is no more a sinner than the man who doesn’t sin but wants to sin.

We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the crimes of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they...

Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in...

Truly, you understand the reverse art of alchemy, the depreciating of the most valuable things! Try, just for once, another recipe, in order not to realise as hitherto the opposite of what you mean to...