The modern mind is merely a blank about the philosophy of toleration; and the average agnostic of recent times has really had no notion of what he meant by religious liberty and equality. He took...

These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign...

The evil of technology was not technology itself, Lindbergh came to see after the war, not in airplanes or the myriad contrivances of modern technical igenuity, but in the extent to which they can distance...

Shouldn’t it be atheists, believing they are not being watched, who commit virtually all the crimes and fill up all the prisons, while people who believe in an omnipresent god lead spotless lives out of...

Loyalty, respect for authority and some degree of sanctification create a more binding social order that places some limits on individualism and egoism.

Reforms will come as all great reforms have always come in ridding us of evils against both man and animal–not as we change our moral principles but as we discern and accept the implications of...

There are many who consider as an injury to themselves any conduct which they have a distaste for, and resent it as an outrage to their feelings; as a religious bigot, when charged with disregarding...

The Roots of Violence: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Knowledge without character, Commerce without morality, Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice, Politics without principles.”(Young India, 22 October 1925)

It is time to effect a revolution in female manners – time to restore to them their lost dignity – and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to...

We must delight in each other, make others conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members...

Subjugation requires vigilance; if you relax your brutality even for a moment, the people you’re oppressing will revolt at the first sign of weakness. That’s why dictatorial regimes are always a slippery slope of cruelty...

The stakes in this game are not low. Our enterprise is no less than the introduction of an alternative language, and with the language an altered perspective, for a group of phenomena that tradition tended...

The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don’t mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed.

You’re so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.

My view [is] that what morality boils down to is, ‘Don’t harm, and do help.’ And now the question is, ‘Can creatures like chickens and cows be harmed?’ And the answer is, ‘Of course they...

There is no dharma greater than a word uttered by a man of conscience; there is no karma greater than a man listening to himself! Since an intention precedes action, it should be the reference...

Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.

If truth and moral values are relative, one cannot claim that certain human rights are universally applicable to all cultures and all people.

But you’re an artist. You don’t believe in decency and honesty and gratitude.

Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him.

A decent life, even a short life, will always be far better than an exceptionally long life lived in ruin.

Having personality does not mean being violent, rather honouring life by taking a stand. In this era so devoid of values, where people think it is safe to do everything that comes to mind, there...

Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.

You can build the Empire State Building. Train the Prussian army. Elevate the hierarchy of a totalitarian state higher than the throne of the Most High.But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your...

…perhaps great sins start as simple weakness, and the consistent placing of self before others.

Our greatest moral regrets are always preceded by a series of unwise choices.

So long as there is death there will be sorrow, and so long as there is sorrow it can be no part of the duty of human beings to increase its amount, in spite of...

The hard core of morality and even of religion seems to me to be just what makes good comedy possible…Where there is no norm, nothing can be ridiculous, except for a brief moment of unbalanced...

Morality he found amusing, in the obscure way that only a man with a Ph.D. in philosophy could find such things amusing, but justice and ethics were inflexible measures, applicable to all, and not to...

Conventionality is not morality.

Christianity is at its purest a philosophy about a person, Jesus Christ, and at its dirtiest a philosophy about requirements and law.

Hatred has no place in your heart. Empathy does.

We’ve also evolved the ability to simply ‘pay it forward’: I help you, somebody else will help me. I remember hearing a parable when I was younger, about a father who lifts his young son...

Morality negates life.

There are ultimately only two possible adjustments to life; one is to suit our lives to principles; the other is to suit principles to our lives. If we do not live as we think, we...

Son, never trust a man who doesn’t drink because he’s probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the...

Press conference [on the movie Carrington] yielded the usual crop of daftness. I’ve been asked if I related personally to Carrington’s tortured relationship with sex and replied that no, not really, I’d had a very...

The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you’re that age, it will cause you pain when you’re older.

The victims of PTSD often feel morally tainted by their experiences, unable to recover confidence in their own goodness, trapped in a sort of spiritual solitary confinement, looking back at the rest of the world...

Regarding the need to pray, the anarch is again no different from anyone else. But he does not like to attach himself. He does not squander his best energies. He accepts no substitute for his...

If a man like that is killed, there is always another to take his place. That is not the important thing. But to act so that no man dares to strike you because he knows...

(From the Author Note at the beginning of the book.) Dorothy L. Sayers used to say that mystery stories were the only moral fiction of the modern world–because in a mystery, you were guaranteed to...

Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.

Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.

True art is by nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values. It is not didactic because, instead of teaching by authority and force, it explores,...

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.

There is a sense in which all cognition can be said to be motivated. One is motivated to understand the world, to be in touch with reality, to remove doubt, etc. Alternately one might say...

What decides whether a man will become immortal, is not his character but his vitality. Nothing save intensity confers immortality. A man manifests himself more vividly, in proportion as he is strong and unified, effective...

To fly without wings. To do what seems impossible. To cling to our loves through the rapids of our hates. To know that God charges us with the task of making these miracles. They exist...

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight,...