Quotes About Morality

If only one man is left standing, a bribe cannot bite.

By contrast, if one conceives the idea of human rights as centring on the notion that each individual is completely autonomous and should have entire control over its own fate, this seems to me unrealistic even for human beings, and far too one-sided to be used as a central tool of morality.

This book is about the problem of evil, but not quite in the traditional sense, since I see it as our problem, not God's. It

Facing the Extreme: Moral life in the concentration camps by Tzvetan Todorov.5 This is a careful study of the moral situation of both prisoners and guards in the German and Russian camps. It shows how much more complex and many-sided that situation was than might have been expected

When men sell their souls, where do the souls go?

We are irrational in our species-?specific devotions. I know a man who won't eat octopus because of its intelligence. Yet he eats pork and buys glue traps for rats, though rats and pigs are highly intelligent, likely more intelligent—?I'm guessing, for I have not seen the SAT scores—?than octopuses. Why, for that matter, is intelligence the scale by which we decide whom to spare? Or size? Have the simple and the small less right to live?

It's amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking. Is cutting the organs out of a dead man and stitching them into someone else barbaric and disrespectful, or is it a straightforward operation to save multiple lives? Does crapping into a Baggie while sitting 6 inches away from your crewmate represent a collapse of human dignity or a unique and comic form of intimacy?

The pay worked out to about $1,000 a year—some five to ten times the earnings of the average unskilled laborer—with summers off. The job was immoral, and ugly to be sure, but probably less unpleasant than it sounds.

What sort of person experimentally infests a child with maggots? A confident sort, certainly. A maverick. Someone comfortable with the unpretty facts of biology. Someone who is perhaps himself an unpretty fact of biology.

Double sentencing wasn't a new idea, but rather the latest variation on the theme. Before that, a murderer might be hanged and then drawn and quartered, wherein horses were tied to his limbs and spurred off in four directions, the resultant "quarters" being impaled on spikes and publicly displayed, as a colorful reminder to the citizenry of the ill-advisedness of crime.

Dissection," writes historian Ruth Richardson in Death, Dissection, and the Destitute, "requires in its practitioners the effective suspension or suppression of many normal physical and emotional responses to the wilful mutilation of the body of another human being.

There are lies and lies. Now and then the Great Recorder must put one on the credit side of the balance, one that has saved intolerable suffering, or has made well and happy a sick soul.

I could not understand why men who knew all about good and evil could hate and kill each other.

Evil thenceforth became my good.

Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?

Who could be interested in the fate of a murderer, but the hangman who would gain his fee?

I saw- with shut eyes, but acute mental vision- I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together... Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.

Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations? I had before been moved by the sophisms of the being I had created; I had been struck senseless by his fiendish threats; but now, for the first time, the wickedness of my promise burst upon me; I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price, perhaps, of the existence of the whole human race.

Era el hombre, efectivamente, tan poderoso, tan virtuoso y magnífico, y no obstante tan depravado y tan bajo? Unas veces parecía un mero vástago del principio del mal; otras,lo más noble y divino que cabe imaginar.

Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so viscious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived as noble and godlike.

For the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a creator toward his creature were, and that i ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness.

it is decided as you may have expected; all judges had rather that ten innocent should suffer, than that one guilty should escape.

Listen to me, Frankenstein. You accuse me of murder, and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature.

I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human