Do FBI Agents and FBI directors have political beliefs? Sure they do. But they’re not supposed to act on them.

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.

It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.

Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.

I can’t stand directors who try to micro-manage everything. When it happens these days I just walk off set, saying if they don’t like the way I’m doing it they can get someone else.

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.

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Rights that do not flow from duty well performed are not worth having.

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

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.

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

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.

I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.

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

I know I’m a good professional, I know that no one’s harder on me than myself and that’s never going to change, under any circumstances.

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.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

When anyone has the power to destroy the whole human race in a matter of hours, it becomes a moral issue. The church must speak out.

We tell lies, yet it is easy to show that lying is immoral.

No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

When I do good I feel good, when I do bad I feel bad, and that’s my religion.

We might come closer to balancing the Budget if all of us lived closer to the Commandments and the Golden Rule.

Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.

There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

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.

When I was president, I announced and I still maintain that I can live with Roe v. Wade. I did everything I possibly could as president under that ruling, which I don’t think ought to be changed, to minimize the need for abortions. I think every abortion is a result of a horrible series of errors on the part of people involved.

I worked in ad sales. I would call up local businesses and try to get them to buy ads in the paper. The whole time, I felt like I was just scamming people.

Do right. Do your best. Treat others as you want to be treated.

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.

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

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

You cannot mix sports with politics.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

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.

In the game of cricket, a hero is a person who respects the game and does not corrupt the game. The one who doesn’t or corrupts the game, they are the villain. They should be punished, and they have been punished in the past.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.

To be is to do.

Virtue is insufficient temptation.

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.

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

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

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.

Justice consists in doing no injury to men; decency in giving them no offense.

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

States are not moral agents.

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.

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.

The violence in the Bible is appalling.

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.

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.

So far as I am concerned, I could not be accused of having set eyes, or having wished to set eyes, upon Darius‘ wife: on the contrary, I have refused even to listen to those who spoke to me of her beauty.

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

No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.

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

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

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