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

There’s no difference between one’s killing and making decisions that will send others to kill. It’s exactly the same thing, or even worse.

Music fills in for words a lot of the time when people don’t know what to say, and I think music can be more eloquent than words.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

Reverence for life is the highest court of appeal.

I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil.

It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.

Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue.

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.

Treat those who are good with goodness, and also treat those who are not good with goodness. Thus goodness is attained. Be honest to those who are honest, and be also honest to those who are not honest. Thus honesty is attained.

All the commandments: You shall not commit adultery, you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and so on, are summed up in this single command: You must love your neighbor as yourself.

As we know, while our species remains alive, everybody has the sacred duty to be optimistic. Ethically, any other behaviour wouldn’t be admissible.

In this business you have to develop a thick skin, but I’m always going to feel everything. It’s my nature.

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

It is not the creation of wealth that is wrong, but the love of money for its own sake.

Of two evils, choose neither.

It makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin.

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

States are not moral agents.

Man’s true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.

Abortion is clearly wrong.

Lawless are they that make their wills their law.

The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

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

Freedom is the right to live as we wish.

I can tell you this: If I’m ever in a position to call the shots, I’m not going to rush to send somebody else’s kids into a war.

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all – the apathy of human beings.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.

The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.

Morality which depends upon the helplessness of a man or woman has not much to recommend it. Morality is rooted in the purity of our hearts.

The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.

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

The fact is that people are good, Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior.

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

People are getting smarter nowadays; they are letting lawyers, instead of their conscience, be their guide.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.

Doing what’s right isn’t the problem. It is knowing what’s right.

Modesty forbids what the law does not.

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.

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

If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.

To see what is right and not to do it is want of courage, or of principle.

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

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?

People who truly understand what is meant by self-reliance know they must live their lives by ethics rather than rules.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

People must have righteous principals in the first, and then they will not fail to perform virtuous actions.

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

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.

There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts.

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

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.