The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.

When you think of the sort of things that happen when a genocide happens, it’s again not people who are intrinsically evil.

The United States is a violent military state. It’s been involved in military action all over the place.

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship.

Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.

I sometimes just don’t like to see the Ultimate Fighting. I just find it, as a martial artist, I just find it too violent.

Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.

We tell lies, yet it is easy to show that lying is immoral.

Morality which depends upon the helplessness of a man or woman has not much to recommend it. Morality is rooted in the purity of our hearts.

It’s not that every single thing that happens on Facebook is gonna be good. This is humanity. People use tools for good and bad, but I think that we have a clear responsibility to make sure that the good is amplified and to do everything we can to mitigate the bad.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war.

Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.

Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.

It is the failing of youth not to be able to restrain its own violence.

The superior man does not, even for the space of a single meal, act contrary to virtue. In moments of haste, he cleaves to it. In seasons of danger, he cleaves to it.

Because of lack of moral principle, human life becomes worthless. Moral principle, truthfulness, is a key factor. If we lose that, then there is no future.

No public man can be just a little crooked.

So far as I am concerned, I could not be accused of having set eyes, or having wished to set eyes, upon Darius‘ wife: on the contrary, I have refused even to listen to those who spoke to me of her beauty.

Sin, also for those who don’t have faith, exists when one goes against one’s conscience. To listen to and obey it means, in fact, to decide in face of what is perceived as good or evil. And on this decision pivots the goodness or malice of our action.

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

When anyone has the power to destroy the whole human race in a matter of hours, it becomes a moral issue. The church must speak out.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

I think if someone gets kicked in the face it is their fault – they watched the foot come towards their face.

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.

Almost half of the population of the world lives in rural regions and mostly in a state of poverty. Such inequalities in human development have been one of the primary reasons for unrest and, in some parts of the world, even violence.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

Compassion is the basis of morality.

All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain.

We moralize among ruins.

Everybody has a job to do. There are people in Iraq on both sides of this war who do what they do for religious reasons, and they feel with God on their side. Some people are good at annihilating people. Maybe that’s their gift.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

The fact is, violence is not only not a beautiful thing, but it’s also very painful and not without consequences for the perpetrator as well as the victim.

War settles nothing.

In the game of cricket, a hero is a person who respects the game and does not corrupt the game. The one who doesn’t or corrupts the game, they are the villain. They should be punished, and they have been punished in the past.

It is right to give every man his due.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

Honesty is the best policy – when there is money in it.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

The threat and use of violence is stimulating nuclear proliferation along with jihadi terrorism.

Injustice is censured because the censures are afraid of suffering, and not from any fear which they have of doing injustice.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

Justice is truth in action.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?

I worked in ad sales. I would call up local businesses and try to get them to buy ads in the paper. The whole time, I felt like I was just scamming people.

I read in the newspapers they are going to have 30 minutes of intellectual stuff on television every Monday from 7:30 to 8. to educate America. They couldn’t educate America if they started at 6:30.

I believe it is universally understood and acknowledged that all men will ever act correctly, unless they have a motive to do otherwise.

I would love to sign on to do a movie if it was the right role and if it was the right script, because I would be taking time away from music to tell a big grand story, and spend all of my time and pouring all of my emotions into being someone else. So for me to do that, it would have to be a story worth telling.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

May be is very well, but Must is the master. It is my duty to show justice without recompense.

There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.