Quotes About Morality

His appraisal of the state of the world was a bleak one: "No one speaks truthfully anymore," he writes. "Everything is deceit, lies, cunning, theft, sodomy, wickedness, with no fear of God or concern for the world. O miserable Christians, worse than beasts, where are you headed?

There's a contradiction in your thinking," I said. "If I took your dirty money, you wouldn't be able to trust my honesty.

You'd steal the pennies off a dead man's eyes and sell his body for soap.

I'm a sharpshooter. I still don't like to kill a man. It's too damn easy to wipe one out and too damn hard to grow one.

Very well, sir, to crime.

Laws cannot make men good: that is the work of the Holy Spirit. But laws can prevent men from doing evil.

Law for the Christian is thus absolute, final, and an aspect of God's creation and a manifestation of His nature. In terms of this, the Christian can hold that right is right, and wrong is wrong, that good and evil are unchanging moral categories rather then relative terms.

Socialism is a product of humanism, because humanism claims the right to legislate at will, and thereby to define sin at will.

The hypocrite is against sin in other people. The godly man is against sin anywhere but, first and foremost, against sin in himself.

When people with money thief and build big house with the money nobody can touch them; when poor people thief a pound of beef people throw their hands in the air and shout for he to go to prison.

Most people who perpetrate evil do not see what they are doing as evil. Evil exists primarily in the eye of the beholder, especially in the eye of the victim.

lock yourself into a virtuous path.

Because of the importance of perceiving the means as morally acceptable, there may be a strong ongoing need for justification in idealistic evil. The person is doing something that would normally be regarded as wrong, such as killing or hurting people. Somehow, the person must sustain the belief that it is right. This is often done by focusing on the goodness of the overriding goal.

The use of violent or oppressive means to solve problems is a common feature in both instrumental and idealistic evil. There is an important difference, however, and that is the extent to which the ends justify the means.

Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, "The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts." The

Evil is but rarely found in the perpetrator's own selfimage. It is far more commonly found in the judgments of others.

A first conclusion was that the actions seemed much less evil—less wrong—to the perpetrators than to the victims.

Evil is not likely to result when people firmly believe that ends do not justify means. If they evaluate their methods by the same lofty standards by which they judge their goals and purposes, evil will be held in check.

The goals of instrumental evil are generally acceptable ones, such as the desire to have money or power, but they are not normally endowed with sufficient moral force to make people think that it is right and good to use violent means. Idealism can make the methods seem right and good, or at least acceptable.

Just as serious modern literature does not have plain old bad guys, sophisticated movies may also avoid such stock figures.

The myth of pure evil, then, is surprisingly durable and elastic. Even when each side provokes and antagonizes the other, the myth can be invoked. Ironically, the myth fails to acknowledge mutual provocation, but it appears that both sides in a conflict are quite capable of seeing themselves as innocent victims and the other as unreasonably, gratuitously wicked.

The challenge of this book is to understand how perpetrators come to do things that others see as evil.

We can understand instrumental evil as the use of a particular set of means to pursue goals that, alternatively, might be pursued with acceptable means. The key question for understanding this form of evil then becomes: What makes people choose evil means rather than other, more acceptable ones?

When I have the opportunity to interview one of these men, I always ask if the death penalty would have deterred him from his crime. Without exception, he'll say no. I asked one rapist why, and he responded by asking me a series of questions. Had I ever skipped school? Yes. Did I know in advance that I would be punished if caught? Yes. Then why did I do it? Because I didn't think I would be caught, I said. There you go, he said.