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.

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

Where there is no opposition to evil, it multiplies.

History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.

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.

Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time.

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

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

If you’d have said Evangelical in 1957, most people wouldn’t know what you were talking about. And then, they’d be against it.

To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

History has proven that each generation of Howard graduates will forge the way forward for our country and our world.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

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

It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false.

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

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. Founder of the Republican Party.

Canada was built on dead beavers.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

If a person is successful, we imagine they are probably also ethical, conscientious and deserving of their good fortune. This obscures the fact that many people who get ahead have done so by doing less than moral actions, which they cleverly disguise from view.

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

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn’t mean what you have isn’t beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have – no one is ever 100 per cent like, ‚Yes, I’m the bomb dot com – from head to toe!‘

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

Justice means minding one’s own business and not meddling with other men’s concerns.

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.

That old law about ‚an eye for an eye‘ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.

The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years.

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.

I would rather die than do something which I know to be a sin, or to be against God’s will.

The flesh, or human nature, is generally lazy and self-centered.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

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

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

Let’s teach kids, at the kindergarten level, what the contributions of people of color were to building the United States of America.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

Ever since the morning of May 29, 1953, when Tenzing Norgay and I became the first climbers to step onto the summit of Mount Everest, I’ve been called a great adventurer.

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‚Look, here’s what happened.‘

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

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.

Americans are rising to the tasks of history, and they expect the same of us.

The facts tell us that no religious Faith releases – or ever has released at any moment in History – a higher degree of warmth, a more intense dynamism of unification than the Christianity of our own day – and the more Catholic it is, the truer my words.

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.

I don’t know who invented high heels, but all women owe him a lot.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

You cannot make a sinner into a saint by killing him. He who does not live as a saint here will never live as a saint hereafter.

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