Quotes About Ethics

I find it easy to forgive the man who invented a devilish instrument like dynamite, but how can one ever forgive the diabolical mind that invented the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.

Decency cannot be discussed without indecency!

Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one.

MRS PEARCE. Mr Higgins: youre tempting the girl. It's not right. She should think of the future. HIGGINS. At her age! Nonsense! Time enough to think of the future when you havnt any future to think of.

I say, if you hate cruelty, remember that nothing is so cruel in its consequences as the toleration of heresy!

I have to live for others and not for myself: thats middle class morality.

I don't want to punish anybody, but there are an extraordinary number of people who I might want to kill.

There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.

Morality can go to its father the devil.

Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt.

A genius is a person who, seeing farther and probing deeper than other people, has a different set of ethical valuations from theirs, and has energy enough to give effect to this extra vision and its valuations in whatever manner best suits his or her specific talents.

Loyalty in a critic is corruption.

When a man says money can do anything that settles it: he hasn't got any. When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

A movement which is confined to philosophers and honest men can never exercise any real political influence.

A movement which is confined to philosophers and honest men can never exercise any real political influence: there are too few of them. Until a movement shows itself capable of spreading among brigands, it can never hope for a political majority.

your uncle Howard is one of the most harmless of men—much nicer than most professional people. Of course he does dreadful things as a judge; but then if you take a man and pay him 5,000 pounds a year to be wicked, and praise him for it, and have policemen and courts and laws and juries to drive him into it so that he can't help doing it, what can you expect?

Marriage is the most licentious of human institutions . . . that is the secret of its popularity.

El cristianismo podría ser bueno si alguien intentara practicarlo.

Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly.

I appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly. In short - a gentlemanly gas deadly by all means, but humane, not cruel.

We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living... A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them.

Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.

It's all right, then. He's not going to act up to his principles.