A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

I just know what is right and I want to do what is right.

Better than worshiping gods is obedience to the laws of righteousness.

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

The President is always abused. If he isn’t, he isn’t doing anything.

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

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

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

Evil is whatever distracts.

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary – public authority, just cause, right motive.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

There’s people that appreciate what I do; there’s people that criticize it.

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

Every sin is the result of a collaboration.

It’s not difficult for me to put my feelings into written form. I try to be concise and to go direct to the subject. This is what people like about my work, and what the critics hate.

Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.

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.

We moralize among ruins.

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

The thing that alarms me is that there are so many clergymen who say that the so-called ‚new morality‘ is all right. They say we’re living in a new generation; let’s be relevant, let’s change God’s law. Let’s say that adultery is all right under certain circumstances; fornication’s all right under certain circumstances. If it’s ‚meaningful.‘

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.

I have zero desire, just so you know, to be in the limelight. I don’t think it’s good for the country to have a former president criticize his successor. You’re not going to see me giving my opinions in the public arena, until I start selling my book. I’m going to emerge then submerge.

Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.

Many religious confessions share common values. They teach that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help.

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

If a person is successful, we imagine they are probably also ethical, conscientious and deserving of their good fortune. This obscures the fact that many people who get ahead have done so by doing less than moral actions, which they cleverly disguise from view.

I’ve been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that’s kind of a religious belief. I mean, it’s at least a moral belief.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

You cannot make a sinner into a saint by killing him. He who does not live as a saint here will never live as a saint hereafter.

If you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.

I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

From my close observation of writers… they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.

He who praises everybody, praises nobody.

For my part, I desire to see the time when education – and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry – shall become much more general than at present, and should be gratified to have it in my power to contribute something to the advancement of any measure which might have a tendency to accelerate the happy period.

I find it amusing that I’m on the Internet now, because I’ve criticized it, but mainly I’ve criticized it on the basis of, ‚What are you going to do with it?‘

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

It is better to do one’s own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins.

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?

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

People who don’t like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that’s how life is.

I tend not to like an awful lot of what is going out under my name now because it is just all product. Who needs it?

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell.

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

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature – opposition to it is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

Truth is certainly a branch of morality and a very important one to society.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

Justice is truth in action.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.