417 quotes found
“Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking.”
“One doesn't commit evil actions in the belief that one is acting wrongly. What allows one to commit such acts is the belief that it will contribute to a greater good.”
“We are our own worst enemy.”
“Do we fulfill our obligations by being practical all the time?”
“And though it be not so in the physical, yet in moral science that which cannot be understood is not always profitless. For the soul awakes, a trembling stranger, between two dim eternities,the ete...”
“If this dysfunctional family was the best Sodom had to offer by way of morals, some might begin to feel a certain sympathy with God and his judicial brimstone.”
“The descent to barbarism had begun with Rotterdam. It ended with Dresden and then with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whatever moral differences had existed when the war began were erased by its end. The ...”
“Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.”
“Im not really interested in the black and white, the 'goodies and baddies.' I find the complexity of the gray areas more compelling, more intriguing. As I have said before, there are angels and dem...”
“If the metaphors in everyday speech are a clue, then all of us associate blankness with virtue rather than with nothingness. Think of the moral connotations of the adjectives: clean, fair, immacula...”
“But the thing I remember most about the screening in October twenty years ago was the moment Julian grasped my hand that had gone numb on the armrest separating our seats. He did this because in th...”
“If children instead of adults would have contolled the world, then the world would have become a better place.”
“There is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of 'expediency.' There is no such thing as sliding up hill. In morals, the only sliders are backsliders.”
“If I am disobeying orders, I'd rather be with God against men than with men against God.”
“When statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.”
“I did the wrong thing, and I lost him for”
“Oh, no, Cameron; I believe we're born free of sin and free of guilt. It's just that we all catch it, eventually. There are no clean rooms for morality, Cameron, no boys in bubbles kept in a guilt-f...”
“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 ...”
“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.”
“What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together”
