Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

In my view, the only thing worse than a rock star is a rock star with a conscience.

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.

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

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

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

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

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

It is better to do one’s own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins.

Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue.

Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

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

When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.

Of two evils, choose neither.

Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can – that is their secret.

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

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.

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

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.

I know of only one duty, and that is to love.

Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.

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.

I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

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

Mutability of temper and inconsistency with ourselves is the greatest weakness of human nature.

I feel that sin and evil are the negative part of you, and I think it’s like a battery: you’ve got to have the negative and the positive in order to be a complete person.

So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.

We conceal it from ourselves in vain – we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.

In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia.

Temptation is a woman’s weapon and man’s excuse.

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.

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

It’s human nature to blame someone else for your shortcomings or upsets.

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

To be is to do.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

The thing that alarms me is that there are so many clergymen who say that the so-called ‚new morality‘ is all right. They say we’re living in a new generation; let’s be relevant, let’s change God’s law. Let’s say that adultery is all right under certain circumstances; fornication’s all right under certain circumstances. If it’s ‚meaningful.‘

War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.

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?

Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always to be blest.

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

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

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

Most dangerous is that temptation that doth goad us on to sin in loving virtue.

One of the powerful temptations is that of the cinema palace. The cinema has undoubtedly an enormous attraction for boys, and people are constantly cudgelling their brains how to stop it. But it is one of those things which would be very difficult to stop even if it were altogether desirable.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

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

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine.