Quotes About Morality

But what a way to do things-never to perform a decent action until you are kicked into it and the rest of the world has ceased to believe that your motives can possibly be honest.

The outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality. Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?

It is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box

La guerra es la guerra. El único ser humano bueno es el que ha muerto.»

Pacifism is a tenable position, provided that you are prepared to live with the consequences.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy;

En realidad, nada era ilegal, ya que no existían leyes.

You are rotting away, you are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn around and look into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity. Now put your clothes on again.

Lo importante no es mantenerse vivo, sino mantenerse humano

Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor

let us not pretend that we go into this war with clean hands. It is only while we cling to the consciousness that our hands are not clean that we retain the right to defend ourselves.

to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.

Society is wrong somewhere at the root.

Çürüyorsun, dedi; parça parça da??l?yorsun. Sen nesin, biliyor musun? Bir pislik torbas?. Åžu sana bakan ÅŸeyi görüyor musun? Son insan bu iÅŸte. Sen insansan, iÅŸte insanl?k bu. Åžimdi giy ÅŸu giysilerini bakal?m.

There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy.

Lo importante no es tanto la moral de las masas, cuya actitud resulta irrelevante con tal de que sigan trabajando, sino la moral del propio Partido. Hasta del miembro más humilde se espera que sea competente, trabajador e incluso inteligente dentro de unos límites, pero también es necesario que sea un fanático crédulo e ignorante...

in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, the prisoner stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path on the way to the gallows. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive.

Most people want to be good, but not that good and not all the time.

I HAD learned early in my career that one can do wrong against one's will, and before long I also learned that one can do wrong without ever discovering what one has done or why it was wrong. There were sins that were too subtle to be explained, and there were others that

La guerra es la guerra. El único ser humano bueno es el que ha muerto.

El lenguaje político —y, aunque con variaciones, esto es cierto en el caso de todos los partidos, desde los conservadores hasta los anarquistas— está diseñado para que las mentiras suenen a verdad y los asesinatos parezcan algo respetable; para dar aspecto de solidez a lo que es puro humo.

No animal shall kill any other animal WITHOUT CAUSE.

A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not, he must work, because work in itself is good—for slaves, at least.

But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make?