Quotes About Values

To live you gotta be hard, I know that. But nobody wants to be a deadset cunt. That's just not fucking decent.

You need some ambition. What big ambition did you have, apart from wantin to be a hero? Nothin. I just wanted to be a good man. That's all I want.

He cares about non-Chiss lives. Yes, he does, Samakro agreed. You threaten his people, and see how fast that changes.

Freedom isn't morally neutral; the emancipation if offers is a means, not an end in itself.

A conscience is the price of morality, and morality is the price of civilization.

Morality in his country had been replaced by what was politically correct or incorrect.

no man who could rationalize the death of a child could truly be called a man at all

Education itself is a putting off, a postponement; we are told to work hard to get good results. Why? So we can get a good job. What is a good job? One that pays well. Oh. And that's it? All this suffering, merely so that we can earn a lot of money, which, even if we manage it, will not solve our problems anyway? It's a tragically limited idea of what life is all about.

Better to have lots of time than lots of money in those early years. There will be time later for earning.

Not, of course, as much as Julia Roberts or David Beckham or Robbie Williams, but he found he wasn't really bothered about that. He was, after all, basically a simple, modest person at heart. Doing a short but honest day's work, doing it well and earning a revoltingly large amount of money would suit him very nicely.

Stan and Rudy are grown men. It's too late to shape their minds, to teach them values and a sense of compassion. You have to do that when kids are young, before their personalities harden and they come to love their own ignorance.

The question is not racial solidarity or class solidarity but a distinction between people who have a soul left and people who have mortgaged their souls for a short-sighted self-gratification—whether

If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.

Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver.

In the life of the individual, an aesthetic sensibility is both more authentic and more commendable than a political or religious one.

Larry, wouldn't it be a fine thing, a swell thing, a boon to the community of man and to all creatures great and small, if this girl's soul was as ripe and stunning as her ass.

Maybe what I admired most about John Steinbeck is that he never mortgaged his 45-acre heart for a suite in an ivory tower.

Morality depends on culture. Culture depends on climate.

Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver. In fact, the person who maintains absolute standards of good and evil usually is the maniac with the revolver.

If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws. ? Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

Freedom has long proven too heady an elixir for America's masses, weakened and confused as they are by conflicting commitments to puritanical morality and salacious greed.

an electronic technology, cultural changes occur more rapidly than value systems can accommodate them, and in the resulting confusion technology itself becomes a surrogate religion. Christ, the core symbol of Western

The economic world, the world of the equities markets, just seemed like a perfect foil, the ideal backdrop against which to contrast this story about legendary amphibians from outer space, because everything these days is all about money. In this book (Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas) I'm hoping to illustrate that there not only are far more important things than money, but there are far more interesting things. (from NPR Interviews edited by Robert Siegel)

To be morally educated is to realize that such would be a terrible price. Mechanical advance is the slack taken up of Our failing humanity. Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended.