Quotes About Good

We are all trained by today's colleges never to take a firm stand on any subject: to be pragmatists, ready to compromise with anyone on anything. Philosophy and morality, however, do not work by compromise. Just as a healthy body cannot compromise with poison, so too a good man cannot compromise with evil ideas. In such a set up, an evil philosophy, like poison, always wins. The good can win only by being consistent. If it is not, then the evil is given the means to win every time.

The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rational interests of men do not clash—that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.

one cannot deal with pure evil, with the naked, full-conscious evil that neither has nor seeks justification.

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer.

What I was referring to was not religion as such, but a special category of abstractions, the most exalted one, which, for centuries, had been the near-monopoly of religion: ethics--not the particular content of religious ethics, but the abstraction ethics, the realm of values, man's code of good and evil, with the emotional connotations of height, uplift, nobility, reverence, grandeur, which pertain to the realm of man's values, but which religion has arrogated to itself.

Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. 'Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. 'Sacrifice' is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don't.

Sacrificio' no significa el rechazo de lo vil, sino de lo precioso. 'Sacrificio' no significa el rechazo del mal por el bien, sino el rechazo del bien por el mal. 'Sacrificio' es la renuncia a lo que uno valora en favor de lo que desprecia.

You called it selfish and cruel that men should trade value for value—you have now established an unselfish society where they trade extortion for extortion. Your system is a legal civil war, where men gang up on one another and struggle for possession of the law, which they use as a club over rivals, till another gang wrests it from their clutch and clubs them with it in their turn, all of them clamoring protestations of service to an unnamed public's unspecified good.

What is morality?" she asked. "Judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price. But where does one find it?

When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it's picked up by scoundrels—and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.

Todo organismo viviente se enfrenta a una alternativa constante: la de la vida o la muerte. La vida es un proceso de acción, autosustentadora y autogenerada. Si un organismo falla en la misma, muere; sus elementos químicos perduran, pero su vida termina. Es sólo el concepto de vida el que hace posible el concepto de valor. Sólo para un ser viviente las cosas pueden resultar buenas o malas.

Is it possible to write a reverent novel, said Nassrin, and to have it be good?...

A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil . . .

only two forces in the world, the army of God and that of Satan.

And so the moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold into a library, we've changed their lives forever, and for the better. This is an enormous force for good.

I resolved the lingering questions of my racial identity. For it turned out there was no single way to be Black; just trying to be a good man was enough.

In fact, the idea of a God who is both all-powerful and all good is a logical impossibility.

If there was one thing I understood about God, it was that he was not good, and if he was good, he was too powerless to deserve our attention.

A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it.

I am telling you what I'm telling you. Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky.

Tiptoe past the dogs of the apocalypse asleep in the shade of your future. Pay at the window. You'll be surprised: you can pass off hope like a bad check. You still have time, that's the thing. To make it good.

How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!

There was hardly anything left of that huge lunch but greasy fingers and a crackle of anise between the teeth. The wine bottle was empty. "Mostly? I believe people want to eat a good lunch, and then take a good piss.

Sometimes, you have to remind yourself the perfect is the enemy of the good.