States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

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

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

In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

Morality is contraband in war.

I am a just man.

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

Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path of least resistance by others. Neither can sustain a free society.

I think that we all know what evil is. We have a sense of what’s evil, and certainly killing innocent people is evil. We’re less sure about what is good. There’s sort of good, good enough, could be better – but absolute good is a little harder to define.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

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

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

Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.

Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.

He incurs a fearful amount of guilt who in the least promotes the aim of the Evil One by trampling upon a tender conscience in a child.

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.

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

Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.

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?

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

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

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.

There is no inherent power in the office of the vice presidency. Zero. None. It’s all a reflection of your relationship with the president. I mean, Kennedy never let Johnson in the office.

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

The answer to the problem of inequality is for the people who are fortunate enough to either have been gifted or deserved more to do everything they can to make the communities around them as strong as they possibly can.

Morality is the basis of things and truth is the substance of all morality.

Force always attracts men of low morality.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

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

It is pretty ironic that the so-called ‚least advanced‘ people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

When you work as a humanitarian, you are conscious that politics have to be considered. Because if you really want to make an extreme change, then you have a responsibility.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right.

Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

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.

In any court-like environment of power, you will inevitably find people who are drawn to those who are successful or powerful, not out of admiration, but out of secret envy.

A return to first principles in a republic is sometimes caused by the simple virtues of one man. His good example has such an influence that the good men strive to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life so contrary to his example.

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.

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.

Ethics and power are separate.

Laws made by common consent must not be trampled on by individuals.

What is permissible is not always honorable.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

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.

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

I believe it is universally understood and acknowledged that all men will ever act correctly, unless they have a motive to do otherwise.

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

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

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this – that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made – not to understand – but to feel – as crime.

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.