Laws control the lesser man… Right conduct controls the greater one.

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

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

Wherever there is interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done.

I don’t think that a leader can control, to any great extent, his destiny. Very seldom can he step in and change the situation if the forces of history are running in another direction.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

I’ve studied authoritarianism for a very long time – for 40 years – and they’re started by people’s attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.

I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.

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

The rise of capitalist practice and morality brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are treated, and also of how they are conceived.

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

Charity creates a multitude of sins.

Don’t create more enemies than you take out by some immoral act.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

States are not moral agents.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

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

Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.

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

To be is to do.

To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?

I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.

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

My relationship to power and authority is that I’m all for it. People need somebody to watch over them. Ninety-five percent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave.

The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice.

The pursuit of truth does not permit violence on one’s opponent.

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

Conscience is a man’s compass.

If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.

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

God made and governs the world invisibly, and has commanded us to love and worship him and no other God; to honor our parents and masters, and love our neighbours as ourselves; and to be temperate, just, and peaceable, and to be merciful even to brute beasts.

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

Obama has no way to conceal that Osama was executed in front of his children and wives, who are now under the custody of the authorities of Pakistan, a Muslim country of almost 200 million inhabitants, whose laws have been violated, its national dignity offended, and its religious traditions desecrated.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

Force always attracts men of low morality.

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.

Only a man’s character is the real criterion of worth.

We need to have business leaders who live by deep, strong principles.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

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

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

He who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.

The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.

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.

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?

The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness.

What I’d really like to control is not machines, but people.

Smiling makes me feel weak and not in control and not powerful and small.

The object of the superior man is truth.

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.

Maleficent was always so elegant. She always was in control. And to play her was difficult. I worked on my voice a lot. She’s bigger than me. She’s on a different level of performance that I have never done.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

I’ll never tell a lie. I’ll never make a misleading statement. I’ll never betray the confidence that any of you had in me. And I’ll never avoid a controversial issue.

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

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

Doing well is the result of doing good. That’s what capitalism is all about.