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3297c43 Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness--to value the failure of your values--is an insolent negation of morality. virtue man mind good morality reason happiness life philosophy john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think thinking morals values evil Ayn Rand
34e0bf7 I lie awake in my bed, clinging to the brightness I have known, fighting back the tide of darkness, the memories of blood and branding and horror, and the legacy of cruelty that runs in my own veins, shaping my own secret vow and wielding it like a brand against the darkness, whispering it to myself, over and over. I will try to be good. morality guilt Jacqueline Carey
fe0704c Every day the choice is presented to us, in a thousand different ways, to live up to the spirit which is in us or to deny it. Whenever we talk about right and wrong we are turning the light of scrutiny upon our neighbors instead of upon ourselves. We judge in order not to be judged. We uphold the law, because it is easier than to defy it. We are all lawbreakers, all criminals, all murderers, at heart. It is not our business to get after the murderers, but to get after the murderer which exists in each and every one of us. And I mean by murder the supreme kind which consists in murdering the spirit. spirit morality law judgment Henry Miller
bd730a0 These are illusions of popular history which successful religion must promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumpths; a good deed is its own rewards; any bad human can be reformed; religious talismans protect one from demon possession; only females understand the ancient mysteries; the rich are doomed to unhappiness virtue history good morality goodness faith religion religious belief-systems dune-arrakis dune-house-atreides evil-men falsehoods justice-of-god dune-messiah dune moral-law religion-philosophy falsehood historical-perspective history-of-thought history-of-mankind belief-system religion-spirituality religious-faith historical beliefs religions moral virtues morals evil Frank Herbert
b8f47fb The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defense, not God's, that the self-righteous should rush. morality Yann Martel
3a71a5f Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it--that no substitute can do your thinking--that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence. virtue pain man mind good independence morality reason happiness life philosophy truth wisdom john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think thinking morals values evil Ayn Rand
a514c2b Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification. virtue man mind existence morality reason life philosophy truth wisdom john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think consciousness thinking morals values Ayn Rand
3f5dfbb Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous--dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say. morality danger ideas James Baldwin
ccdae90 It is their mores, then, that make the Americans of the United States...capable of maintaining the rule of democracy.... Too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores.... I am convinced that the luckiest of geographical circumstances and the best of laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of mores, whereas the latter can turn even the most unfavorable circumstances...to advantage.... If I have not succeeded in making the reader feel the importance I attach to the practical experience of the Americans, to their habits, laws, and, in a word, their mores, I have failed in the main object of my work. -Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in American morality usa liberty constitution values Naomi Wolf
8f3d166 If the Bahreini royal family can have an embassy, a state, and a seat at the UN, why should the twenty-five million Kurds not have a claim to autonomy? The alleviation of their suffering and the assertion of their self-government is one of the few unarguable benefits of regime change in Iraq. It is not a position from which any moral retreat would be allowable. morality autonomy bahrain kurdistan royalty statehood kurdish-people iraq iraq-war Christopher Hitchens
21ced4e Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child. morality Hermann Hesse
69bbfbb "We did an evil thing, father." "What do you think war is? We're men. Not boys swinging sticks at each other and pronouncing the evil wizard's defeat. We do what duty and honor demand, and often what we do is terrible." -- war morality Daniel Abraham
a5b2acf It is not easy to explain why God permits evil; but it is impossible for an atheist to explain the existence of goodness. How could a spiritless, soul-less, cross-less, Godless universe become the center of faith, purity, sacrifice, and martyrdom? How can decency be the decent thing if there is no God? Since God is love, why should we be surprised that want of it should end in pain, hate, broken hearts, and war? morality goodness god Fulton J. Sheen
9dfb978 Morality depends on culture. Culture depends on climate. morality Tom Robbins
26af213 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 are not--that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation. Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral--that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings. morality religion god Sam Harris
9c425e3 Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies...It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil. virtue man mind good morality reason life philosophy john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism think thinking morals values evil Ayn Rand
d4aa10e Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking--that the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide of action--that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise--that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality--that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind--that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one's consciousness. virtue pain man mind good morality reason happiness life philosophy truth wisdom john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think thinking morals values evil Ayn Rand
4c555ad Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders' attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. virtue man mind good morality reason life philosophy truth wisdom john-galt pursuit-of-happiness objectivism rational think thinking morals values evil Ayn Rand
b7b67db A spirit of license makes a man refuse to commit himself to any standards. The right time is the way he sets his watch. The yardstick has the number of inches that he wills it to have. Liberty becomes license, and unbounded license leads to unbounded tyranny. When society reaches this stage, and there is no standard of right and wrong outside of the individual himself, then the individual is defenseless against the onslaught of cruder and more violent men who proclaim their own subjective sense of values. Once my idea of morality is just as good as your idea of morality, then the morality that is going to prevail is the morality that is stronger. morality objective-truth standards Fulton J. Sheen
8cb6107 Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no 'morality'. For what's 'morality' but a leash around the neck? A noose? What's 'morality' but what other people want you to do, for their own, selfish, unstated purposes? morality eros Joyce Carol Oates
29e603b The moral high ground is a lovely place. It won't stop a missile, though. It won't alter the trajectory of a gauss round. morality missile realist morals James S.A. Corey
5da8fab And now they were weary and frightened because they had gone against a system they did not understand and it had beaten them. They knew that the team and the wagon were worth much more. They knew the buyer man would get much more, but they didn't know how to do it. Merchandising was a secret to them. morality faith spirituality ethics John Steinbeck
456ad94 No man is such a legalist as the good Secularist. morality the-law secularism G.K. Chesterton
9258267 It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. morality inspiration life philosophy societal-expectations society human-nature psychology Leo Tolstoy
a5c4d21 Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren't necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning. morality philosophy veganism ethics Robert M. Sapolsky
cae8193 Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings. evolution morality evolutionary-psychology Peter Singer
808f52c The point of protesting about 'moral equivalence' is surely not to blur moral choices on 'our side'. Is it? morality moral-equivalence Christopher Hitchens
2ddf6e0 "According to Melanie Klein, we develop moral responses in reaction to questions of survivability. My wager is that Klein is right about that, even as she thwarts her own insight by insisting that it is the ego's survivability that is finally at issue. Why the ego? After all, if my survivability depends on a relation to others, to a "you" or a set of "yous" without whom I cannot exist, then my existence is not mine alone, but is to be found outside myself, in this set of relations that precede and exceed the boundaries of who I am. If I have a boundary at all, or if a boundary can be said to belong to me, it is only because I have become separated from others, and it is only on condition of this separation that I can relate to them at all. So the boundary is a function of the relation, a brokering of difference, a negotiation in which I am bound to you in my separateness. If I seek to preserve your life, it is not only because I seek to preserve my own, but because who "I" am is nothing without your life, and life itself has to be rethought as this complex, passionate, antagonistic, and necessary set of relations to others. I may lose this "you" and any number of particular others, and I may well survive those losses. But that can happen only if I do not lose the possibility of any "you" at all. If I survive, it is only because my life is nothing without the life that exceeds me, that refers to some indexical you, without whom I cannot be." grief loss klein morality life otherness butler seperation boundaries self-preservation dissociation survival Judith Butler
4461067 Even though Christ Himself would not deliver us from the power of the Totalitarian State, as He did not deliver Himself, we must see His purpose in it all. Maybe his children are being persecuted by the world in order that they might withdraw themselves from the world. Maybe His most violent enemies may be doing His work negatively, for it could be the mission of totalitarianism to preside over the liquidation of a modern world that became indifferent to God and His moral laws. jesus morality the-cross totalitarianism god-s-will Fulton J. Sheen
ed6e5c3 The state is concerned with the promotion of outward righteousness arising from the individual being constrained to keep the law. The Gospel alters human nature, whereas the state merely restrains human greed and evil, having no positive power to alter human motivation. morality grace-and-law Alister E. McGrath
8f1034f As he grew older, which was mostly in my absence, my firstborn son, Alexander, became ever more humorous and courageous. There came a time, as the confrontation with the enemies of our civilization became more acute, when he sent off various applications to enlist in the armed forces. I didn't want to be involved in this decision either way, especially since I was being regularly taunted for not having 'sent' any of my children to fight in the wars of resistance that I supported. (As if I could 'send' anybody, let alone a grown-up and tough and smart young man: what moral imbeciles the 'anti-war' people have become.) fathers war humour courage morality civilisation iraq war-on-terror iraq-war sons enemies resistance Christopher Hitchens
54a3539 In 1881, being on a visit to Boston, my wife and I found ourselves in the Parker House with the 's, and went over to Charleston to hear him lecture. His subject was 'Some Mistakes of Moses,' and it was a memorable experience. Our lost leaders, -- , , Theodore Parker, -- who had really spoken to disciples rather than to the nation, seemed to have contributed something to form this organ by which their voice could reach the people. . The wonderful power which Washington's Attorney-general, Edmund Randolph, ascribed to of insinuating his ideas equally into learned and unlearned had passed from 's pen to 's tongue. . { } laughter sympathy emotion poetry morality reason imagination friendship humor love truth wisdom inspirational lecture henry-d-thoreau henry-thoreau mirth orator pathos ralph-e-emerson ralph-emerson ralph-waldo-emerson some-mistakes-of-moses henry-david-thoreau ingersoll robert-g-ingersoll robert-green-ingersoll robert-ingersoll emerson memorable praise boston art thoreau simplicity paine thomas-paine tears respect logic honor power speech voice Moncure Daniel Conway
f091105 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 and unique. Immortality knows nothing of morality or immorality, of good or evil; it measures only work and strength; it demands from a man not purity but unity. Here, morality is nothing; intensity, all. immortality morality immorality Stefan Zweig
8442d77 All men are sinners. morality sinner right-and-wrong sin George R.R. Martin
5d7c085 Science tries to record and explain the factual character of the natural world, whereas religion struggles with spiritual and ethical questions about the meaning and proper conduct of our lives. The facts of nature simply cannot dictate correct moral behavior or spiritual meaning. morality religion science ethics Stephen Jay Gould
814b528 When did the very first case of racism even occur? When did such blind hatred devour the souls of men and make them turn on their own brothers and sisters? What ever taught them that it was normal to be such monsters? hatred prejudice racism man history human morality sister brother race monster Rebecca McNutt
7a44d20 The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility. There are times when we must take this poison - just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy to live. We can not succumb to despair. Force is and I suspect always will be part of the human condition. There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral. We in the industrialized world bear responsibility for the world's genocides because we had the power to intervene and did not. We stood by and watched the slaughter in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Rwanda where a million people died. The blood for the victims of Srebrenica- a designated UN safe area in Bosnia- is on our hands. The generation before mine watched, with much the same passivity, the genocides of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and the Ukraine. These slaughters were, as in, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book Chronical of a Death Foretold, often announced in advance violence war morality genocide morals Chris Hedges
939430b "I do not listen when anyone uses the word immoral," said the Wizard. "In the young it is ridiculous, in the old it is sententious and reactionary and an early warning sign of apoplexy. In the middle-aged, who love and fear the idea of moral life the most, it is hypocritical." morality Gregory Maguire
a419ee0 A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture. It acts, when it has to act, as late in the game as possibl, and as cautiously, because it knows its girth and the tight confines of the china shop it's blundering into. And it knows that no matter how well prepared it is -- no matter how ruthlessly it has held its projections up to intelligent scrutiny -- the place it is headed for is going to very different from the place it imagined. The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one's intent, equals the evil one will do. morality intelligence saunders complexity ethics george humility George Saunders
3c0e7f9 Our Blessed Lord left the world without leaving any written message. His doctrine was Himself. Ideal and History were identified in Him. The truth that all other ethical teachers proclaimed, and the light that they gave to the world, was not IN them, but OUTSIDE them. Our Divine Lord, however, identified Divine Wisdom with Himself. It was the first time in history that it was ever done, and it has never been done since. jesus morality religion Fulton J. Sheen
8293e3b 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 the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision. It should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing justice and mercy among men: it does mean that we are very swift in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy: a wild page from any Prussian sophist makes men doubt it. Progress should mean that we are always walking towards the New Jerusalem. It does mean that the New Jerusalem is always walking away from us. We are not altering the real to suit the ideal. We are altering the ideal: it is easier. progress morality relativism G.K. Chesterton
369d051 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 his own ethics as self-evident and enforced them; such as decency or the error of the Adamite heresy. Then he was horribly shocked if he heard of anybody else, Moslem or Christian, taking his ethics as self-evident and enforcing them; such as reverence or the error of the Atheist heresy. And then he wound up by taking all this lop-sided illogical deadlock, of the unconscious meeting the unfamiliar, and called it the liberality of his own mind. Medieval men thought that if a social system was founded on a certain idea it must fight for that idea, whether it was as simple as Islam or as carefully balanced as Catholicism. Modern men really think the same thing, as is clear when communists attack their ideas of property. Only they do not think it so clearly, because they have not really thought out their idea of property. morality religion philosophy medieval toleration st-francis G.K. Chesterton
615584f On Wall Street, Clarence was a diamond in a sea of glass, never greedy, never an ambulance-chaser, never the kind of person who deserved to die in the way that he did. morality greed wall-street september-11-attacks glass Rebecca McNutt
006d33d Morality in the general is well enough known by men, but the particular refinements of virtue are unknown by most persons; thus the majority of parents, without knowing it and without intending it, give very bad examples to their children. morality example parenting young Anne Robert Jacques Turgot
13485d4 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 to refer to with such words as 'spirituality', 'piety', 'morality', 'ethics' and 'asceticism'. If the manoeuvre succeeds, the conventional concept of religion, that ill-fated bugbear from the prop studios of modern Europe, will emerge from these investigations as the great loser. Certainly intellectual history has always resembled a refuge for malformed concepts - and after the following journey through the various stations, one will not only see through the concept of 'religion' in its failed design, a concept whose crookedness is second only to the hyper-bugbear that is 'culture'. morality spirituality religion piety culture ethics practising Peter Sloterdijk
24f6cb5 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 principles already held. morality reform principles Matthew Scully
8e3dca1 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 Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said that you should just live in a way which made you feel real, and that the real thing to do was the right thing too. Mma Ramotswe had listened in astonishment. You did not have to go to France to meet existentialists, she reflected; there were many existentialists right here in Botswana. Note Mokoti, for example. She had been married to an existentialist herself, without even knowing it. Note, that selfish man who never once put himself out for another--not even for his wife--would have approved of existentialists, and they of him. It was very existentialist, perhaps, to go out to bars every night while your pregnant wife stayed at home, and even more existentialist to go off with girls--young existentialist girls--you met in bars. It was a good life being an existentialist, although not too good for all the other, nonexistentialist people around one. morality philosophy Alexander McCall Smith
2e27734 Education has nothing whatever to do with moral deterioration; and if one must admit that it develops a resolute spirit among the people, that is far from being a defect. morality Fyodor Dostoyevsky
71d51b1 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 be joked about. morality philosophy universality justice Charlie Huston
4d6cb72 It's not some romanticized Atticus Finch-type picnic. You'd probably love it, the whole risk of it all, but it's not without a price. Out there in this city when you pass the bar, it's all broken dreams and out-of-reach stars. You have to be brilliant, and you have to throw away your social life, your hobbies, but more than that you can't get your moral values mixed up with legal ethics. They'll both clash whenever you least expect it, and when you hit a crossroad you have to know when to go left or right or when to just blindly go forward... can you do that? morality life bar-exam attorney legal legal-system law-school lawyer law Rebecca McNutt
bc447e8 If 10 percent of the population were to take a consciously ethical outlook on life and act accordingly, the resulting change would be more significant than any change of government, kindness morality moral-philosophy ethics Peter Singer
744ea3c That's because you're a highly moral person. I'm not. I don't judge, not even myself. morality judgement Philip K. Dick
8cc68b0 Leave it to the Alderaanians to slap a cheery end on a nice little grisly children's morality tale. morality han Timothy Zahn
4acfd87 An area of land used for crops will feed about ten times as many people as the same area of land used for grass-fed beef. morality philosophy veganism ethics Peter Singer
14112cd Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world-which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on us, very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will--that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. racism history morality identity blacks whites american-history race-relations race James Baldwin
2342117 In foreign policy, a modest acceptance of fate will often lead to discipline rather than indifference. The realization that we cannot always have our way is the basis of a mature outlook that rests on an ancient sensibility, for tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good so much as triumph of one good over another that causes suffering. Awareness of that fact leads to a sturdy morality grounded in fear as well as in hope. The moral benefits of fear bring us to two English philosophers who, like Machiavelli, have for centuries disturbed people of goodwill: Hobbes and Malthus. morality machiavelli Robert D. Kaplan
cb2a309 "Conscience, Christ, and the gift of faith make evil men uneasy in their sin. They feel that if they could drive Christ from the earth, they would be free from "moral inhibitions." They forget that it is their own nature and conscience which makes them feel that way. Being unable to drive God from the heavens, they would drive his ambassadors from the earth. In a lesser sphere, that is why many men sneer at virtue--because it makes vice uncomfortable." christianity morality conscience Fulton J. Sheen
99e05ab Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle. racism morality truth contradictions race-relations race James Baldwin
e21b883 Morality means choice. Choice means priorities. Priorities mean a hierarchy. A hierarchy means something at the top, a standard. That is the greatest good. If you have no greatest good, you have no hierarchy, you have no priorities. If you have no priorities, you cannot make intelligent choices. If you cannot make intelligent moral choices, you have no morality. You can still guide your life by your feelings or by social fashions, but that is not choice - not free, responsible, moral choice. Both feelings and fashions push you; you are passive. But moral choice is your own doing; you are active. You are responsible for your choices but not for your feelings or for your environment's fashions. freedom morality philosophy decision-making Peter Kreeft
5e07d38 ...the one certain thing in life is that no one can make the truth untrue simply because it hurts. true morality inspirational-quotes philosophy truth David Weber
536335a This mundus tenebrosus, this shaddowy world of Mankind, is sunk into Night; there is not a Field without its Spirits, nor a City without its Daemons, and the Lunaticks speak Prophesies while the Wise men fall into the Pitte. We are all in the Dark, one with another. And, as the Inke stains the Paper on which it is spilt and slowly spreads to Blot out the Characters, so the Contagion of darkness and malefaction grows apace until all becomes unrecognizable. Thus it was with the Witches who were tryed by Swimming not long before, since once the Prosecution had commenced no Stop could be put to the raving Women who came forward: the number of Afflicted and Accused began to encrease and, upon Examination, more confess'd themselves guilty of Crimes than were suspected of. And so it went, till the Evil revealed was so great that it threatened to bring all into Confusion. And yet in the way of that Philosophie much cryed up in London and elsewhere, there are those like Sir Chris. who speak only of what is Rational and what is Demonstrated, of Propriety and Plainness. Religion Not Mysterious is their Motto, but if they would wish the Godhead to be Reasonable why was it that when Adam heard that Voice in the Garden he was afraid unto Death? The Mysteries must become easy and familiar, it is said, and it has now reached such a Pitch that there are those who wish to bring their mathematicall Calculations into Morality, viz. the Quantity of Publick Good produced by any Agent is a compound Ratio of his Benevolence and Abilities, and such like Excrement. They build Edifices which they call Systems by laying their Foundacions in the Air and, when they think they are come to sollid Ground, the Building disappears and the Architects tumble down from the Clowds. Men that are fixed upon matter, experiment, secondary causes and the like have forgot there is such a thing in the World which they cannot see nor touch nor measure: it is the Praecipice into which they will surely fall. morality witches darkness malefaction witch-trials occult-philosophy occult occultism corruption witch rationality Peter Ackroyd
af11054 "Values aren't buses," she said shortly. "They're not supposed to get you anywhere. They're supposed to define who you are. And I'd rather be touchy-feely than morally bankrupt." morality sinning sins morals values Jennifer Crusie
410c0d7 Perception of personal danger very often set people on the path of virtue. virtue morality Donna Leon
c439d48 "Perhaps this is what Henry James meant when he talked about the "irresponsibility" of characters. Characters are irresponsible, art is irresponsible when compared to life, because it is first and foremost important that a character be real, and as readers or watchers we tend to applaud any effort made towards the construction of that reality. We do not, of course, indulge actual people in the world this way at all. In real life, the fact that something seems real to someone is not enough to interest us, or to convince us that that reality is interesting. But the self-reality of fictional characters is deeply engrossing, which is why villains are lovable in literature in ways that they are not in life." morality life fiction-writing James Wood
fffac0f "...all a guy can do is die once. The big difference is whether he dies clean - or dirty... ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")" morality honor Cornell Woolrich
f45d41b what is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with the others, not that which we have with ourselves morality José Saramago
a1a6a40 "In fact the "mask" theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism", and Robert Jackall, in "Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate managers", refer repeatedly to the "masks" that corporate functionaries are required to wear, like actors in an ancient Greek drama. According to Jackall, corporate managers stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces. Kimberly seems to have perfected the requisite phoniness and even as I dislike her, my whole aim is to be welcomed into the same corporate culture that she seems to have mastered, meaning that I need to "get in the face" of my revulsion and overcome it. But until I reach that transcendent point, I seem to be stuck in an emotional space left over from my midteen years: I hate you; please love me." theatre morality mask corporate-culture corporate-world phony faking fake masks smile moral smiling drama self-control Barbara Ehrenreich
95c03b3 "Honesty is a moral virtue, a matter of the will. Honesty means willing the truth with the whole of your heart. This demands sacrifice. We have little hope of attaining honesty unless we realize how demanding it is. It demands sacrifice of self-will, self-image, the desire to win, and the comfort of being right. The "honesty" often praised today is usually only emotional honesty with others, not intellectual honesty with one's self; only "letting it all hang out," not asking what is the real truth. Sometimes "honesty" is only a code word for shamelessness. Rarely does it mean the absolute, fanatical, selfless love of truth." morality philosophy truth Peter Kreeft
fef62ac there's no better system than our own morality, not law, not science, not religion... just decency. morality religion science philosophy law Rebecca McNutt
54a8ff1 I come only to ask a simple question. Is Muad'Dib's death to be followed by the moral suicide of all men? Is that the inevitable aftermath of a Messiah? morality religion Frank Herbert
eb849d5 Artists are indeed unlikely to be good, goodness would silence them. good morality Iris Murdoch
8978a9d Many people who think nothing of buying factory-farmed ham or chicken from a supermarket are quick to condemn hunting; yet hunting is more defensible than factory farming. morality veganism philosophy-of-life ethics Peter Singer
141528a Pro Life' or 'Right to Life' movement is misnamed. Those who protest against abortion but dine regularly on the bodies of chickens, pigs and calves can hardly claim to have concern for 'life' as such. Their concern about embryos and fetuses suggests only a biased concern for the lives of members of our own species. morality philosophy ethics Peter Singer
d7cea25 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. She just happened to be the first one he's come across, that was all. What about the man in the living room, though? For God's sake! he flared back. I'm not going to rape the woman! Crossing your fingers, Neville? Knocking on wood? He ignored that, beginning to suspect his mind of harboring an alien. Once he might have termed it conscience. Now it was only an annoyance. Morality, after all, had fallen with society. He was his own ethic. Makes a good excuse, doesn't it, Neville? Oh, shut up. rape morality sexual-desire harassment ethic society instinct right-and-wrong Richard Matheson
517e6bc Not only do I believe that it is possible to maintain moral standards without the crutch of religion--but I would argue that it is the only way to achieve true goodness and express real altruism. Free from the constraints of organized religion, a human being is able to express decency from one's self--as opposed to attempting to appease whatever higher power he or she may believe in. morality religion good-without-god morality-versus-worship David G. McAfee
fc5f3b3 The continuing belief that the world is fundamentally just is implied in the very complaint that there has been an injustice. morality philosophy Alain de Botton
6dd79f2 In fact, the Nazis did not have a euthanasia program, in the proper sense of the word. Their so-called euthanasia program was not motivated by concern for the suffering of those killed. If it had been, they would not have kept their operations secret, deceived relatives about the cause of death of those killed, or exempted from the program certain privileged classes, such as veterans of the armed services or relatives of the euthanasia staff. Nazi 'euthanasia' was never voluntary and often was involuntary rather than nonvoluntary. 'Doing away with useless mouths' - a phrase used by those in charge - gives a better idea of the objectives of the program than 'mercy-killing'. Both racial origin and ability to work were among the factors considered in the selection of patients to be killed. It was the Nazi belief in the importance of maintaining a pure Aryan Volk - a quasi-mystical racist concept that was thought of as more important than mere individuals' lives - that made both the so-called euthanasia program and later the entire holocaust possible. Proposals for the legalization of euthanasia, on the other hand, are based on respect for autonomy and the goal of avoiding pointless suffering. morality philosophy euthanasia nazi Peter Singer
f552d73 I don't like vegans, either. Bunch of whiny zealots. A cow or a pig wouldn't give a damn if a person died... animals tear apart other animals while they're still alive, but we aren't so cruel, so vegans should learn to shut up. Vegans use palm oil and never think about the forests and endangered species at risk from that... and they all exploit the world in other ways, buying their computers and their sweatshop clothes and their Starbucks coffees. Anyway, cats and dogs eat their owners after the owner dies. I saw on the news a few times that there was a lot of open animal food in the houses where that sort of thing happens, but the pets eat the dead owner... just because. Maybe a pet's notion of 'unconditional love' is like Jeffrey Dahmer... he used to eat and kill the people he professed to love, too. He was a sicko... I don't believe animals have any empathy. Do elephants ever consider Holocaust victims? Do dogs ever cry over the Rwanda Genocide? empathy morality jeffrey-dahmer pet-ownership veganism vegan ethics hypocrisy Rebecca McNutt
621dff4 It isn't enough to stand up and fight darkness. You've got to stand apart from it, too. You've got to be different from it. virtue morality Jim Butcher
eaee640 Say I decide that it would be a good thing to insert pictures here demonstrating cultural relativism, displaying an act that is commonsensical in one culture but deeply distressing in another. I know, I think, I'll get some pictures of a Southeast Asian dog meat market. Like me, most readers will likely resonate with dogs. Good plan! On to Google Images and the result is that I spend hours transfixed, unable to stop, torturing myself with picture after picture of dogs being carted off to market. Dogs being butchered, cooked and sold. Pictures of humans going about their day's work in a market indifferent to a crate stuffed to the top with suffering dogs. I imagine the fear those dogs feel. How they are hot, thirsty, in pain. I think, what if these dogs had come to trust humans? I think of their fear and confusion. I think, what if one of the dogs whom I've loved had to experience that? What if this happened to a dog my children loved? And with my heart racing, I realize that I hate these people. Hate! Every last one of them and despise their culture. And it takes a locomotive's worth of effort for me to admit that I can't justify that hatred and contempt. That mine is a mere moral intuition. That there are things that I do that would evoke the same response in some distant person whose morality and humanity are certainly no less than mine. And that but for the randomness of where I happen to have been born, I could have readily had their views instead. The thing that makes the tragedy of commonsense morality so tragic, is the intensity with which you just know that They are deeply wrong. In general, our morally tinged cultural institutions, religion, nationalism, ethnic pride, team spirit, bias us toward our best behaviors when we are single shepherds, facing a potential tragedy of the commons. They make us less selfish in Me versus Us situations, but they send us hurtling toward our worst behaviors when confronting Thems and their different moralities. morality cultural-relativism Robert M. Sapolsky
550602e If I'm all alone, then the standard for sanity is up to me entirely. sanity solitude morality society self-esteem Susan Wiggs
67e768a "Elwood said, "It's against the law." State law, but also Elwood's. If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it. If he looked the other way, he was as implicated as the rest. That's how he saw it, how he'd always seen things." wrong morality complicity law right guilt Colson Whitehead
3f82c21 "All faults or defects, from the slightest misconduct to the most flagitious crime, Pantocyclus attributed to some deviation from perfect Regularity in the bodily figure, caused perhaps (if not congenital) by some collision in a crowd; by neglect to take exercise, or by taking too much of it; or even by a sudden change of temperature, resulting in a shrinkage or expansion in some too susceptible part of the frame. Therefore, concluded that illustrious Philosopher, neither good conduct nor bad conduct is a fit subject, in any sober estimation, for either praise or blame. For why should you praise, for example, the integrity of a Square who faithfully defends the interests of his client, when you ought in reality rather to admire the exact precision of his right angles? Or again, why blame a lying, thievish Isosceles when you ought rather to deplore the incurable inequality of his sides? Theoretically, this doctrine is unquestionable; but it has practical drawbacks. In dealing with an Isosceles, if a rascal pleads that he cannot help stealing because of his unevenness, you reply that for that very reason, because he cannot help being a nuisance to his neighbours, you, the Magistrate, cannot help sentencing him to be consumed - and there's an end of the matter. But in little domestic difficulties, where the penalty of consumption, or death, is out of the question, this theory of Configuration sometimes comes in awkwardly; and I must confess that occasionally when one of my own Hexagonal Grandsons pleads as an excuse for his disobedience that a sudden change of the temperature has been too much for his perimeter, and that I ought to lay the blame not on him but on his Configuration, which can only be strengthened by abundance of the choicest sweetmeats, I neither see my way logically to reject, nor practically to accept, his conclusions. For my own part, I find it best to assume that a good sound scolding or castigation has some latent and strengthening influence on my Grandson's Configuration; though I own that I have no grounds for thinking so. At all events I am not alone in my way of extricating myself from this dilemma; for I find that many of the highest Circles, sitting as Judges in law courts, use praise and blame towards Regular and Irregular Figures; and in their homes I know by experience that, when scolding their children, they speak about "right" or "wrong" as vehemently and passionately as if they believed that these names represented real existences, and that a human Figure is really capable of choosing between them." morality humor punishment right-and-wrong logic Edwin A. Abbott
ca78c42 When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there. morality Joan Didion
c933d19 ...she thought of him as a person who did not have a normal spine, but had instead, a firm reed of goodness. morality goodness Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
f9479c8 Dairy farmers routinely remove calves from their mothers at an early age so that the milk will be available for humans; anyone who has lived on a dairy farm will know that, for days after the calves have gone, their mothers keep calling for them. morality veganism philosophy-of-life ethics Peter Singer
e16ae73 Mme Martin: Quelle est la morale ? Le Pompier: C'est a vous de la trouver. morality Eugène Ionesco
5750431 To argue against abortion on the grounds that it prevents beings of high intrinsic value coming into the world is implicitly to condemn practices that reduce the future human population: contraception, whether by 'artificial' means or by 'natural' means such as abstinence on days when the woman is likely to be fertile, and also celibacy. This argument does not provide any reason for thinking abortion worse than any other means of population control. If the world is already overpopulated, the argument provides no reason at all against abortion. morality philosophy ethics Peter Singer
0906c77 To explain our conventional ethical attitudes, is not to justify them. morality philosophy Peter Singer
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