I think most defense attorneys know, to some extent, their clients are guilty.

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.

Algorithms diminish public safety in this country. They ask us to pretend that lengthy arrest records and violent crimes don’t matter. They ask police to scoop up the bad guys only for the courts to immediately release them. They turn us into a bad joke.

Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.

Politics have no relation to morals.

I believe many people feel like God is mad at them.

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

Just because you’ve seen ‚My Cousin Vinny‘ doesn’t qualify you to be a federal judge.

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.

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?

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

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

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

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.

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

If co-operation is a duty, I hold that non-co-operation also under certain conditions is equally a duty.

Judges ought to be more leaned than witty, more reverent than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.

Never stir up litigation. A worse man can scarcely be found than one who does this.

Laws control the lesser man… Right conduct controls the greater one.

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

I don’t believe in killing whatever the reason!

A judge sworn to decide impartially can offer no forecasts, no hints, for that would show not only disregard for the specifics of the particular case, it would display disdain for the entire judicial process.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.

Faced with what is right, to leave it undone shows a lack of courage.

There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information – the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified.

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

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

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

Writers are always writing about infidelity. It’s so dramatic. The wickedness of it, the secrecy, the complications, the finding that you thought you were one person but you’re also this other person. The innocent life and the guilty life. My God, it’s just full of stuff for a writer. I doubt it will ever go out of fashion.

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

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

I don’t use Twitter for bad.

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

The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of good life.

Compassion is the basis of morality.

Fear is the mother of morality.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.

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.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die; a sustainable world. It could be great.

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.

Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It’s a black wall. It’s a thief.

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

Arizona presents no specific reason for excepting capital defendants from the constitutional protections extended to defendants generally, and none is readily apparent.

There never was a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?

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

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

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

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

We need to have business leaders who live by deep, strong principles.

Where do the evils like corruption arise from? It comes from the never-ending greed. The fight for corruption-free ethical society will have to be fought against this greed and replace it with ‚what can I give‘ spirit.

God made and governs the world invisibly, and has commanded us to love and worship him and no other God; to honor our parents and masters, and love our neighbours as ourselves; and to be temperate, just, and peaceable, and to be merciful even to brute beasts.