Quotes About Values

by conflating profligacy with evil and asceticism with virtue, the moral sense can sanctify pointless displays of sacrifice.

Finally, power-law distributions have "thick tails," meaning that they have a nonnegligible number of extreme values. You will never meet a 20-foot man, or see a car driving down the freeway at 500 miles per hour. But you could conceivably come across a city of 14 million, or a book that was on the bestseller list for 10 years, or a moon crater big enough to see from the earth with the naked eye—or a war that killed 55 million people.

In this way of thinking, the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it's a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don't have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.

The alternative, then, to the religious theory of the source of values is that evolution endowed us with a moral sense, and we have expanded its circle of application over the course of history through reason (grasping the logical interchangeability of our interests and others'), knowledge (learning of the advantages of cooperation over the long term), and sympathy (having experiences that allow us to feel other people's pain).

Yet the single best predictor of emancipative values is the World Bank's Knowledge Index

Certainly the taste for cruelty clashes with the values of a cooperative society: it must be harder to work with your neighbors if you think they might enjoy seeing you disemboweled.

progress" unguided by humanism is not progress.

For those who need data to be convinced, in global surveys of values in which every variable that social scientists like to measure is thrown into the pot (including income, education, and dependence on oil revenues), Islam itself predicts an extra dose of patriarchal and other illiberal values across countries and individuals.

After noting Snow's "utter lack of intellectual distinction and . . . embarrassing vulgarity of style," Leavis scoffed at a value system in which "'standard of living' is the ultimate criterion, its raising an ultimate aim.

They write as if the consumption of elite art is the ultimate moral good.

Also, a large swath of our intellectual culture is loath to admit that there could be anything good about civilization, modernity, and Western society.

I think moralistic science is bad for morals and bad for science.

Los ciudadanos de los países más ricos sienten más respeto por los valores emancipatorios o liberales tales como la igualdad de la mujer, la libertad de expresión, los derechos de los homosexuales, la democracia participativa y la protección del medio ambiente.

Yet in every issue touched by the Rights Revolutions—interracial marriage, the empowerment of women, the tolerance of homosexuality, the punishment of children, and the treatment of animals—the attitudes of conservatives have followed the trajectory of liberals, with the result that today's conservatives are more liberal than yesterday's liberals.

He measures our lives by how we love.

I'd rather have a small part in a movie I love than a bigger part in one I don't care about.

How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most.

I define personal success as being consistent to my own personal mission statement: to love God and love others.

When you're dating, abstinence is a greater expression of love than making love, because you're doing what's best for your beloved, not just what feels good in the moment.

Wish you would learn to love people and use things and not the other way around

Our social and economic systems are so devoid of humanity and love.

To live; to love; to learn; and to leave a legacy.

I love baseball and I don't want to be part of anything that would cheapen it or vulgarize it.

Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.