Quotes About Morality

Was it different if you went in knowing you had made the decision to kill? Was it different if you did it in self-defense? In defense of another? In defense of a species?

Throughout history, certain doctors have done terrible things. It's never nice to be reminded.

He's not a villain," Dorcas said, "He's a hero who happens to be on the other side of the war.

The boy is a whore. For slightly less than the price of a good meal-food which the wolf has no use for-that wolf could hire his mouth, his hands…other things.

My people have a saying that every civilization is founded in a terrible crime.

What kind of a sociopath wore a projectile weapon in a pressure vessel? Well, a pirate who would think nothing of murdering a whole crew of people, even if those people were monsters. Silly question. Moving on now.

I wish I could say I wasn't proud of it-I know I wouldn't be proud of it when I quit being a temporary psychopath, but it wasn't so easy to stop enjoying it, either.

It was a morally complex equation.

Moral compromises don't stop happening even when everyone involved is trying to do the right thing.

One of the interesting things about programming people of all sorts to be more ethical is that it also makes them more ethical about the limits of programming people to be more ethical.

Consciences are the sort of thing that don't seem really desirable to have, unless you're currently using yours.

The Exalt Rien knew were monsters as much as Lords and Ladies. If Rien was Exalt, would she become a monster, too?

Farweather just wanted what she wanted. She did what she felt like doing. She didn't care who got hurt, and she didn't feel social responsibilit to mitigate the harm, or seek compromise, or balance her needs against the needs of others.

They were the first ones to die, you know. You can't accuse them of hypocrisy. The Governors Assessed their creators first.

Humans have their hearts. Humans have their souls. And look at the abominations they achieve.

Why are people named Lovelace always villains when they appear in questionable literature? The only more certain moral doom lies in being namd Raffles.

Never be afraid of doing the thing you know in your heart is right, even if others don't agree.

Society was self-interest given a pretty gloss.

Was honour the same as conscience? If not, how did one choose between them? And was the choice, when made, bitter as gall?

Money, influence, and human imperatives always spoke more loudly than conscience and God.

Good people were also capable of doing very bad things.

Let's just say that if you were stealing TVs instead of thoughts, you would have been caught by a half-deaf, mostly blind, fifteen year old dog three robberies ago.

In your time, politicians win points in the polls for proposing to punish unmarried teenaged mothers like me, not to mention our children.

The war had made everyone a liar, thought Milan bitterly. The war had made it so that one could not distinguish at all between what was true and what false, between victims and perpetrators, or between perpetrators and perpetrators, or victims and victims.