Quotes About Ethics

Censorship is serious and drastic business; it should never set merely upon guesswork and more particularly not upon the guesses of men so staunch in morals that they are obviously of distant kin to the rest of humanity.

It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation.

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight, But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.

I never thought honor would feel like betrayal.

Our virtues make us; but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times.

We may be tainted with pragmatism, but it only needs a clash of personalities to remind us of our principles.

This is Maximilien de Robespierre, barrister-at-law: unmarried, personable, a young man with all his life before him. Today against his most deeply held convictions he has followed the course of the law and sentenced a criminal to death. And now he is going to pay for it.

He says in his defence he never meddled with married women, only with virgins.

But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future.

The lawyer's world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.

Even in the republic of virtue you need a man who will shovel up the shit.

I never know why Hope is accounted a virtue," Camille said. "It seems so selfserving.

Statements, indictments, bills are circulated, shuffled between judges, prosecutors, the Attorney General, the Lord Chancellor's office; each step in the process clear, logical, and designed to create corpses by due process of law.

You must, of course. Robespierre doesn't lie or cheat or steal, doesn't get drunk, doesn't fornicate—overmuch. He's not a hedonist or a mainchancer or a breaker of promises." Danton grinned. "But what's the use of all this goodness? People don't try to emulate you. Instead they just pull the wool over your eyes.

Men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own.

If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?

If I want a woman, best to rent one by the hour.

Somewhere – or Nowhere, perhaps – there is a society ruled by philosophers. They have clean hands and pure hearts. But even in the metropolis of light there are middens and manure-heaps, swarming with flies. Even in the republic of virtue you need a man who will shovel up the shit.

Late May, he demanded without success the abolition of the death penalty.

Men have been known to do anything and everything.

Let us say, his will is convinced, but not his conscience.

Listen, son, this is what I know: right is what you can get away with, and wrong is what they whip you for. As I'm sure life will instruct you, by and by

Usually he is the soul of courtesy. But if you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?

Somewhere—or Nowhere, perhaps—there is a society ruled by philosophers. They have clean hands and pure hearts. But even in the metropolis of light there are middens and manure-heaps, swarming with flies. Even in the republic of virtue you need a man who will shovel up the shit, and somewhere it is written that Cromwell is his name.