It’s okay to eat fish because they don’t have any feelings.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

Love is an interesting thing. Perhaps I’ve never been in love before – I don’t really know? I think I have. I guess it’s subjective in that way.

Most people would rather give than get affection.

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

I’m not Ted Nugent. My house is run, essentially, by an adopted, fully clawed cat with a mean nature. I would never hunt. I would never wear fur. I would never go to a bullfight. I’m not really a meat and potatoes guy.

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.

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

Love is a serious mental disease.

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.

If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.

We humans are self-absorbed by nature, and spend most of our time focusing inwardly on our emotions, on our wounds, on our fantasies.

The uncertainty of parenting can bring up feelings in us that range from frustration to terror.

I think in defeat you grope for things that are happy, and it’s hard.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

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.

I think that it’s okay to be mad at someone who hurt you. This isn’t about, like, the pageantry of trying to seem like nothing affects you.

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

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

Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.

To be is to do.

Doo-wop is special music to me because it’s so straightforward and melody-driven and captures emotions.

Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.

Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere.

If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it.

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.

And whether you’re an honest man, or whether you’re a thief, depends on whose solicitor has given me my brief.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

The heart is forever inexperienced.

Good jokes are gems. A good idea is hard to come by. I couldn’t give them to someone else, even for money. It just wouldn’t seem right.

Life is about conduct and how we conduct ourselves. But two wrongs never make a right.

Because of lack of moral principle, human life becomes worthless. Moral principle, truthfulness, is a key factor. If we lose that, then there is no future.

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature – opposition to it is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

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

For me, often, there’s such a cloud of melancholia about knowing I’m going to have to leave my daughter on her own. I don’t know what age that is going to be, thank God. It just doubles me up in grief.

All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.

If you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.

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.

There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young.

The spirit desires to remain with its body, because, without the organic instruments of that body, it can neither act, nor feel anything.

Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.

When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart’s the last part moves, her last, the tongue.

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

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.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.

We all have done something unethical.

From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.

I’m so nervous. I’ve always been nervous, ever since I was a kid.

And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

In the world of money and investing, you must learn to control your emotions.

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

I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

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.