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.

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

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

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

Understand, when you eat meat, that something did die. You have an obligation to value it – not just the sirloin but also all those wonderful tough little bits.

Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors.

What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.

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

It means, people who are in high and responsible positions, if they go against righteousness, righteousness itself will get transformed into a destroyer.

Where there is no opposition to evil, it multiplies.

States are not moral agents.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that ‚Oryx and Crake‘ is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it’s neutral.

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

In England, when an athlete gets to the top, we do our best to destroy him.

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.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.

Success consecrates the most offensive crimes.

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.

Whoever wishes to keep a secret must hide the fact that he possesses one.

I feel strange when I get applauded by people in power… because it’s obvious that it’s them I’m criticizing, but they can’t show that in front of the cameras. It’s quite funny sometimes.

Thomas Jefferson once said, ‚We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.‘ And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.

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.

I always want to listen to people and receive good criticism, but I just don’t have to answer to them; I have to answer to God.

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

Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.

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

Ethics and power are separate.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

Right after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, amid all the cheers and applause, there were a few critical comments questioning the legality of the act.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

He that would live in peace and at ease must not speak all he knows or all he sees.

Rather leave the crime of the guilty unpunished than condemn the innocent.

I’ve had big record label presidents look me in the face and say, ‚Your music sucks, you don’t know who you are, your music is all over the place, and we don’t know how to market this stuff. Pick a lane and come back to us.‘

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

I do not pilfer victory.

May be is very well, but Must is the master. It is my duty to show justice without recompense.

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

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

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

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.

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

Let him that is without stone among you cast the first thing he can lay his hands on.

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.

I just didn’t want to get out there anymore; I didn’t want to get back into what I call ‚the swamp.‘ And the other reason why is I don’t think it’s good for the presidency for a former president to be opining about his successor. President Obama’s got plenty of critics – and I’m just not gonna be one.

The violence in the Bible is appalling.

Reverence for life is the highest court of appeal.

No obligation to do the impossible is binding.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.

When there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned.

Morality is contraband in war.

Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principles which direct them.

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.

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

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.

I don’t think it’s a good advert for any restaurant, a fat chef, and secondly, who wants to eat a dessert when the chef’s a fat pig.

I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.