No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.

Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.

Force always attracts men of low morality.

The story being told in ‚Star Wars‘ is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you’re in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they’re actually not.

If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us.

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

It wasn’t until we got our first office in Palo Alto where things became more like a company. We never went into this wanting to build a company.

Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.

If the Great Way perishes there will morality and duty. When cleverness and knowledge arise great lies will flourish. When relatives fall out with one another there will be filial duty and love. When states are in confusion there will be faithful servants.

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

Even if the politics needed doesn’t exist today, we still need to use our voices to make sure that the people in power are focused on the right things. Because this is a democracy, and in a democracy, people are the ones who run the country.

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.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

Morality is of the highest importance – but for us, not for God.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

The moral disapprobation of society has an impact on behavior in societies.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

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.

It’s so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

Sometimes we look at gay being a bigger sin than being proud or not telling the truth. I don’t think God categorizes sins.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

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 production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

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

A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty.

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

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

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

That sort of half sigh, which, accompanied by two or three slight nods of the head, is pity’s small change in general society.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good… Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.

I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world.

We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

The first and greatest punishment of the sinner is the conscience of sin.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don’t like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.

Someday, the capitalist system will disappear in the United States, because no social class system has been eternal. One day, class societies will disappear.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

The French are so into themselves that they don’t even notice you.

I have this feeling that the world is not in balance. And people are afraid, but we’re also starting to be really brave.

A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today – and in fact we have forgotten.

One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.

The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.

Lawless are they that make their wills their law.

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.‘

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.

This will never be a civilized country until we spend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

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.

Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.

Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.

The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

Most people are happy being average. Most are happy being faceless in a sea of faces.

Where do the evils like corruption arise from? It comes from the never-ending greed. The fight for corruption-free ethical society will have to be fought against this greed and replace it with ‚what can I give‘ spirit.

In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same.

I find myself hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.

The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.