Quotes About Morality

A wise ruler ought never to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interests.

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.

How we live is so different from how we ought to live that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation.

Most human virtues, I would argue, are social virtues. To the extent that we care about love, justice, or kindness, we care about how people enact these virtues with respect to other people. No one is interested in whether you love yourself, whether you are just to yourself, or whether you are kind to yourself. People care about whether you show these qualities to others. And so friendship lays the foundation for morality.

The arc of our evolutionary history is long. But it bends towards goodness

What's right and what's true are different.

Technology is amoral, and inventions are routinely deployed in ways their creators neither intend nor sanction.

Some degree of prostitution will probably always be with us, but we need not acquiesce to widespread sexual slavery.

The public frets about cheating with food stamps (the fraud rate is about 1.5 percent) yet doesn't understand that zillionaires hide assets abroad and thereby deprive the Treasury of some $36 billion a year in taxes—enough to pay for high-quality pre-K and day care for all.

With the 'death' of God worldly values proliferate, separate out and are drawn into endless conflict with one another. This process leads to the formation of a world torn by an infinite number of value-conflicts, for 'rational' (scientific) knowledge, which, for Weber, is limited to questions of fact rather than value, is unable to resolve the crisis of values that it itself inaugurated.

There is no justice among men.

In the end you should always do the right thing even if it's hard.

Only the devil wishes everyone to be his friend.

Do I get up every morning and ask: am I doing the things that I believe in and am I doing them for the best possible motives? Yes. Unambiguously yes.

Who in conscience would not choose to stand with them and against Jamaat-e-Islami, craven Indian politicians, apartheid South Africa, Islamist Iran, Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, the Tory intelligentsia, the Tory government, shabby Labour MPs playing Chicago politics, book-burners, life-deniers, witch-finders and murderers?

Hate is not wrong when you hate what is wrong.

T]he upheavals [of artificial intelligence] can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic. Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease." —NICK BILTON, tech columnist, The New York Times

I resolve right then not to kill him. Decent people affect me that way. The

I'd have to be a sociopath to be a traitor. I'm a psychopath. There's a difference, believe me. Psychopaths believe in something, even if that something's not actually real." "Where's

I can tell he's a good man who doesn't like his job for all the right reasons. He seemed on the verge of constant indigestion. "If

Over and again, you allow the hard logic of the market to usurp human choice and so you create a society with the morality of an anthill, where all human life is reduced to labour, all freedom flattened by the demand for efficient production, all weakness punished, all violence justified, where schools and hospitals are cut while crime and alienation flourish and millions are thrown into the deep pit of unemployment.

Yet you'd kill me if you could. Why, you have just tried! So why is your killing justified, and mine is not?

It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.

Character is what you do when no one else is watching.