For a war to be just three conditions are necessary – public authority, just cause, right motive.

I just usually go with my own taste. If I like something, and it happens to be against the law, well, then I might have a problem.

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

To secure peace is to prepare for war.

Of two evils, choose neither.

The word ‚good‘ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

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

It is not the creation of wealth that is wrong, but the love of money for its own sake.

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.

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

As this long and difficult war ends, I would like to address a few special words to the American people: Your steadfastness in supporting our insistence on peace with honor has made peace with honor possible.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War.

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?

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.

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.

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.

To do a great right do a little 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.

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.

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.

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.

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

‚Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age‘ was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant’s thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren’t easy questions.

The object of the superior man is truth.

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginning of all wars – yes, an end to this brutal, inhuman and thoroughly impractical method of settling the differences between governments.

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

Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or unambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others.

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

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.

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.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.

How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

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

For my part, I desire to see the time when education – and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry – shall become much more general than at present, and should be gratified to have it in my power to contribute something to the advancement of any measure which might have a tendency to accelerate the happy period.

I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

Injustice is censured because the censures are afraid of suffering, and not from any fear which they have of doing injustice.

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

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

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

Throughout my career, I learned plenty about war on the battlefield, but I learned even more about the importance of finding peace. And that is what the State Department and U.S.A.I.D. do: prevent the wars that we can avoid so that we fight only the ones we must.

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!

We lived in a tall, narrow Victorian house, which my parents had bought very cheaply during the war, when everyone thought London was going to be bombed flat. In fact, a V-2 rocket landed a few houses away from ours. I was away with my mother and sister at the time, but my father was in the house.

Laws are silent in time of war.

I think you have a moral responsibility when you’ve been given far more than you need, to do wise things with it and give intelligently.