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.

Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.

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

What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

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

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

Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty.

Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

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

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

We’ve become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy. I think that’s been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I’ve ever seen in my life.

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

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

Reverence for life is the highest court of appeal.

It’s better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost.

We moralize among ruins.

I don’t like being told what to do and kissing you-know-what to get up the corporate ladder.

I intend to live forever. So far, so good.

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

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

Ethics and power are separate.

I can tell you this: If I’m ever in a position to call the shots, I’m not going to rush to send somebody else’s kids into a war.

One thing I want to make clear, as far as my own rebirth is concerned, the final authority is myself and no one else, and obviously not China’s Communists.

I believe in the Golden Rule – The Man with the Gold… Rules.

To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

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.

A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls… saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

One who sees the Supersoul accompanying the individual soul in all bodies and who understands that neither the soul nor the Supersoul is ever destroyed, actually sees.

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

Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

Your body has space within you that cannot die.

Success consecrates the most offensive crimes.

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

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

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

Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.

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.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

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

All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain.

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

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

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

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

No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.

People who truly understand what is meant by self-reliance know they must live their lives by ethics rather than rules.

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

The stars shall fade away, the sun himself Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years, But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, Unhurt amidst the wars of elements, The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds.

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.

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.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

Those who have virtue always in their mouths, and neglect it in practice, are like a harp, which emits a sound pleasing to others, while itself is insensible of the music.

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