The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

You cannot be in a position of power and destroy the life of another person.

I’ve never been a manipulator, even in my bachelor days. I never wanted to do things to people that could catch up with me later on.

When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine.

As we know, while our species remains alive, everybody has the sacred duty to be optimistic. Ethically, any other behaviour wouldn’t be admissible.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.

One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

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

Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.

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

Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

I would be loath to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.

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

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

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

He who steals a little steals with the same wish as he who steals much, but with less power.

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

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.

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

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

In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same.

I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.

To be safe at the expense of the liberty of other people is a difficult equation.

To be is to do.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.

There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young.

To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.

I can hardly eat meat because it has to look like something what it was not when it was alive.

In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

To terrify children with the image of hell… to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?

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.

A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.

The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state.

Desire of having is the sin of covetousness.

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.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

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

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

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

Richard Nixon was an evil man – evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency.

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’m always pushing for human responsibility. Given that chimpanzees and many other animals are sentient and sapient, then we should treat them with respect.

You’re morally tainted if you don’t treat both the accuser and the accused with fairness and with respect, and with due process.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.

The rulers of the state are the only persons who ought to have the privilege of lying, either at home or abroad; they may be allowed to lie for the good of the state.

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.

Since the world has existed, there has been injustice. But it is one world, the more so as it becomes smaller, more accessible. There is just no question that there is more obligation that those who have should give to those who have nothing.

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

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

Wherever there is interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done.

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 thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

Sin is geographical.

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.‘

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.