I do not recognize the right of the public to break in the front door of a man’s private life in order to satisfy the gaze of the curious… I do not think it right to dissect living men even for the advancement of science. So far as I am concerned, I prefer a post mortem examination to vivisection without anaesthetics.

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

The safest course is to do nothing against one’s conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.

States are not moral agents.

At home I am a nice guy: but I don’t want the world to know. Humble people, I’ve found, don’t get very far.

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?

I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don’t like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.

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

I believe in the Golden Rule – The Man with the Gold… Rules.

There are always people always asking you for something. But I feel like I have a foundation. I have a supporting cast where it doesn’t bother me too much.

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

Even if you’re happy with the life you’ve chosen, you’re still curious about the other options.

Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

It is perfectly possible to live a very moral life without a belief in God, and I think it’s perfectly possible to live a life peppered with ill-doing and believe in God.

Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.

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

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.

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

Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.

I don’t use Twitter for bad.

Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.

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

Ethics and power are separate.

I have wondered about time all my life.

Good jokes are gems. A good idea is hard to come by. I couldn’t give them to someone else, even for money. It just wouldn’t seem right.

The violence in the Bible is appalling.

I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.

I don’t believe in God but I’m very interested in her.

I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.

I’m all for a good rivalry as long as lines are drawn.

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.

Trouble brews when we steal from the poor and give to the rich.

No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expedience.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

I think that when you are famous every weakness is exaggerated.

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

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty.

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

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

Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do.

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

The first rule of business is: Do other men for they would do you.

Regardless of what society says, we can’t go on much longer in the sea of immorality without judgment coming.

The American doctor, in my opinion, possesses a combination of conservatism and that other quality which has put the United States in the forefront in almost every department of science – that is, an eagerness to know what it is really all about in order that he may not be the one left behind if there is something to it.

I’m entirely interested in people, and also other creatures and beings, but especially in people, and I tend to read them by emotional field more than anything. So I have a special interest in what they’re thinking and who they are and who’s hiding behind those eyes and how did he get there, and what’s the story, really?

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

To be is to do.

Every man has a right to risk his own life for the preservation of it.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

You cannot mix sports with politics.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

Man’s true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.

To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.

The word ‚good‘ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

Ethics is the activity of man directed to secure the inner perfection of his own personality.

Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

Touch a scientist and you touch a child.

There’s strong data that, within companies, the No. 1 reason for ethical violations is the pressure to meet expectations, sometimes unrealistic expectations.