Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been...

One peculiarity of our present [ethical] climate is that we care much more about our rights than about our ‘good’. For previous thinkers about ethics, such as those who wrote the Upanishads, or Confucius, or...

The state is a voluntary association of individuals designed to serve their individual interests. The state is not a faceless villain. The state is all of us. But freedom does not mean the freedom to...

Rules, whether they govern sexual morality or financial probity, regardless of whether they are justifiable or undesirable, always provoke bold recalcitrants to devise clever, defiant ways to breach them.

If you spend your life on a moral hill-top, you see nothing but the mud below. If, like me, you live in the mud itself, you get a damned good view of clear blue sky...

The only crime is pride.

So maybe the difference isn’t language. Maybe it’s this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong...

We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.

Most men—it is my experience—are neither virtuous nor scoundrels, good-hearted nor bad-hearted. They are a little of one thing and a little of the other and nothing for any length of time: ignoble mediocrities.

It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are...

Genocide is the responsibility of the entire world.

A moral man is essentially dumbfounded when confronted by a man who is amoral—everything the latter does is met with a certain disbelief.

There is no enemy that respect and love will not conquer. The moral authority for survival comes from respect.

The advantage to a person on being simple and humble all the time is that he is always adorable to innocent hearts, but not to those ignorant minds that treat his simplicity as a sign...

It is often easier to fight for one’s principles than it is to live up to them.

How I treat a brother or sister from day to day, how I react to the sin-scarred wino on the street, how I respond to interruptions from people I dislike, how I deal with normal...

Only way to live here is day by day, same as anywhere.

Life is two things. Life is morality – life is adventure. Squire and master. Adventure rules, and morality looks up the trains in the Bradshaw. Morality tells you what is right, and adventure moves you....

Without moral values, which should begin in Congress, America will lose her roots, her basis, her thesis.

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

When people start talking about Right and Left, they stop talking about right and wrong.

Popular medicine and popular morality belong together and ought not to be evaluated so differently as they still are: both are the most dangerous pseudo-sciences.

There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don’t care, or...

I tell you that man has no more tormenting care than to find someone to whom he can hand over as quickly as possible that gift of freedom with which the miserable creature is born....

Now here comes in the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age. We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit...

Latter-day capitalism. Like it or not, it’s the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there’s fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for...

I can explain why I have to do what I’m about to do, but I’m acutely aware that an explanation is not a righteous justification. What’s bad is bad even if necessary.

You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.

Some people talk of morality, and some of religion, but give me a little snug property

If you can’t do something smart, do something right.

There is no honour in betraying your friends.

Verily, Allah enjoins justice, and the doing of good to others; and givinglike kindred; and forbids indecency, and manifest evil, and wrongfultransgression. (The Holy Quran, an-Nahl 16:91)This verse sets forth three gradations of doing good.The...

Killing a pig for a good old fry-up is one thing. But there’s no excuse for being cruel, even if you’re a bored teenage kid.

It seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the...

What was it about us, as humans, that drove us to make apologies for beautiful things?

If it’s wrong when they do it, it’s wrong when we do it.

Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

Republics exist as long as the people “adhere to principles and virtue.

Do we behave out of fear of punishment, or out of the demands of our heart? For me, it is the latter, as I would hope is true for all adults, thought I know from...

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argues that human beings cannot be truly good or moral without faith in God and without submis- sion to the will of Christ. Unfortunately, Lewis does not provide any...

Given our obsession with self, it is hardly surprising we think it is fine for us to live in a world with malleable moral markers, as long as we get our own way without being...

He took the woman from her bed, pretending not to notice the question posed in his mind: Why do you always experiment on women? He didn’t care to admit that the inference had any validity....

that great condenser of moral chaos, The City.

If it’s okay to enrich ourselves by denying foreigners the right to earn a living, why shouldn’t we enrich ourselves by invading peaceful countries and seizing their assets? Most of us don’t think that’s a...

While we are actually subjected to them, the ‘moods’ and ‘spirits’ of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must...

I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who...

A true comedian is really a good humanitarian, but a very rare few match up to that high standard.

99% of all addicts are liars and thieves. This might sound unfair and even close-minded, but it’s the truth. There are some exceptions to the rules, but they are incredibly rare. Most people are no...

One of the primary reasons we don’t seek counsel from the wise people around us is that we already know what we are going to hear–and we just don’t want to hear it.