Quotes About Ought

For all its terrible faults, in one sense America is still the last, best hope of mankind, because it spells out so vividly the kind of happiness that most people actually want, regardless of what they are told they ought to want.

Jeremy Bentham opened his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation with the famous sentence "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.

He found the courses at law school ill-suited to his temperament, noting critically that the professors were more concerned with "what law is, not what it ought to be," emphasizing legal precedents rather than justice.

Should. Ought. Scenarios again, she thought crossly, which was how the mind persistently worked, using facts and assumptions left over from the past to draw conclusions that were frequently in error.

There's a saying by some great writer or other that no man is a hero to his valet. Perhaps everyone ought to have a valet.

I know I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case.

In a crunch a man's reputation never counts for as much as it ought to.

When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.

Philosophy can forsake too easily the details of experience… many writers and painters have demonstrated that thinking long about what art is or ought to be ruins the power to write or paint.

There is no injunction, no "ought" in political economy at all. It

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. …'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government's policies, that are so hated.

His soul was bigger than a body's ought to be.

Generalizations, like brooms, ought not to stand in a corner forever; they ought to sweep as a matter of course.

I have made and accepted my own version of the natural order of things, and actually supposed a universe that has, or damn well ought to have, my convenience in mind.

Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence . . . the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake.

There ain't many troubles that a man caint fix With seven hundred dollars and a thirty ought six.

I don't think it would be a good idea for scientists to have more political power. Scientists as a group are more inclined to try to derive an ought from an is, than the population at large.

In trying to think through what is happening and why and in trying to understand thereby what ought to be done, the nation's social scientists and journalists and politicians seek explanations.

It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.

That fact that I will embrace her is a deliberate, measured response, not a spontaneous one. I'll hug her, for I feel as though I ought to, not because I want to. I feel nothing.

Such evidence is not the only kind which produces belief; though positivism maintains that it is the only kind which ought to produce so high a degree of confidence as all minds have or can be made to have through their agreements.

It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.

But who was she? The question again, as if there ought to be a very specific answer. Maybe an allure that strong always creates a feeling of recognition. Some one I ought to know, have known, dreamt up, been in love with forever. ~Jeremy