If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

I reject any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality.

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.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.

Man has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Morality arose largely as an empirical defence of the individual and society. Ever since intelligent beings began to be in contact, and consequently in friction, they have felt the need to guard themselves against each other’s encroachments.

Success consecrates the most offensive crimes.

I do think there should be some regulations on AI.

Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

‚Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.

The object of the superior man is truth.

When there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned.

I think God gives every one of us our own will, and unfortunately, some people choose to do evil things with it.

The strength of a man’s virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

To see what is right and not to do it is want of courage, or of principle.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

Honor is the reward of virtue.

An individual’s refusal to carry out the criminal acts of his government sets the stage, in the most effective way possible, for the attempt to demonstrate the criminal nature of these acts.

It makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin.

In honorable dealing you should consider what you intended, not what you said or thought.

Morality is of the highest importance – but for us, not for God.

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.

The Internet is just another experiment showing us more sides of us.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

There’s no difference between one’s killing and making decisions that will send others to kill. It’s exactly the same thing, or even worse.

No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

Whoever has provoked men to rage against him has always gained a party in his favor, too.

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

Charity creates a multitude of sins.

We all have the duty to do good.

When I was president, I announced and I still maintain that I can live with Roe v. Wade. I did everything I possibly could as president under that ruling, which I don’t think ought to be changed, to minimize the need for abortions. I think every abortion is a result of a horrible series of errors on the part of people involved.

The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

I don’t believe in killing whatever the reason!

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that ‚Oryx and Crake‘ is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it’s neutral.

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

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

The story being told in ‚Star Wars‘ is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you’re in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they’re actually not.

Only a man’s character is the real criterion of worth.

Honor and shame from no condition rise. Act well your part: there all the honor lies.

The world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. We all have a dark side, a tendency to manipulate, and aggressive desires. The most dangerous types are those who repress their desires or deny the existence of them, often acting them out in the most underhanded ways.

Honor has not to be won; it must only not be lost.

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

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

I would rather die than do something which I know to be a sin, or to be against God’s will.

Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.