If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

Repeal the Missouri Compromise – repeal all compromises – repeal the Declaration of Independence – repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It will be the abundance of man’s heart that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too.

Faced with what is right, to leave it undone shows a lack of courage.

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

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

If you’re not going to be rewarded for your virtues, and instead you’re going to be punished for them, then what’s your motivation to continue?

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.

He who steals a little steals with the same wish as he who steals much, but with less power.

Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.

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.

In time we hate that which we often fear.

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?

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.

The dropping of bombs on people – isn’t that terrorism?

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

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.

Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office.

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

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.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

Ultimately, I’m not doing that much. I’m only doing what a human being who feels wants to do – in my way, without stepping out of my flow, while staying in my lane. Without, I guess, boring people.

We’re all sinners. Everybody you meet all over the world is a sinner.

When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake.

I just know what is right and I want to do what is right.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

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.

My message isn’t perfectly defined. I have, as a human being, fallen to peer pressure.

Honor is simply the morality of superior men.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

There is a moral obligation that those who have should give to those who don’t.

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

A President’s hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.

A man’s delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.

Of what use is a philosopher who doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings?

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

The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

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?

The ‚morality of compromise‘ sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don’t compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised.

If humans were totally unstructured creatures, they would be… a tool which can properly be shaped by outside forces.

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.

I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation. Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

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.

There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information – the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified.

Politics have no relation to morals.

I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.

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

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition.

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

The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.