Quotes About Morality

If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off?

Correct morality can only be derived from what man is — not from what do-gooders and well-meaning aunt Nellies would like him to be.

The way to find justice is to deal fairly with other people and not worry about how they deal with you.

I see the beauty of Mike's attempt to devise an ideal ethic and applaud his recognition that such must start by junking the present sexual code and starting fresh. Most philosophers haven't the courage for this; they swallow the basics of the present code--monogamy, family pattern, continence, body taboos, conventional restrictions on intercourse, and so forth--then fiddle with details...even such piffle as discussing whether the female breast is an obscene sight! (p.365)

Unless you intend to kill him immediately thereafter, never kick a man in the balls. Not even symbolically. Or perhaps especially not symbolically.

My point is that one person is responsible, Always. If H-bombs exist--and they do--some man controls them. In terms of morals there is no such thing as 'state'. Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts.

contrary to some opinions, it is better to be a dead hero than a live louse. Dying is messy and inconvenient but even a louse dies someday no matter what he will do to stay alive and he is forever having to explain his choice.

The more you love, the more you can love—and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had time enough, he could love all of that majority who are decent and just. Masturbation is cheap, clean, convenient, and free of any possibility of wrongdoing—and you don't have to go home in the cold. But it's lonely.

But I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

Nobody paid attention; they walked around or stepped over – except one woman carrying a baby, who stopped, kicked him carefully in face, then went down ramp.

If I choose to dine with publicans and sinners, that is my business. But I do not choose to break bread with Pharisees.

Men are always for hire who like dirty work.

A man who bets on greed an dishonesty won't be wrong too often.

Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal—else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy.

If you do not believe that a man will commit murder for one can of tomatoes, then you have never been hungry.

I'm not suggesting anything. People get hurt every day. This matter must be cleared up, Joseph, for everybody. The greatest good of the greatest number, as you are so fond of quoting.

There is no such thing as a humane war.

Simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it a 'good.

Any man who would take money two ways would take it three ways just as quickly.

I see your point. It irks you to see anyone at all who is able to work permitted to live without working. But why do you consider work a virtue?

But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required, too, for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom invariably accomplishes evil.

The Bible is such a gargantuan collection of conflicting values that anyone can prove anything from it.

Minds me of a married woman who was very proud of her virtue. She slept with other men only when her husband was away.

Every citizen is free to perform any act which does not hamper the equal freedom of another. No law shall forbid the performance of any act, which does not damage the physical or economic welfare of any other person.