Quotes About Ethics

human being has no natural rights of any nature.

That was Heinlein in a nutshell: the responsible human being, the competent human being, the human being who knows how to die gallantly when faced with the Birkenhead drill. Not because it's heroic, but because

Surely where a man lives is the least important thing about him.

By the sixties everyone talked about his "rights" and no one spoke of his duties—and patriotism was a subject for jokes.

If you're going to be businessmen, don't confuse the vocation with larceny.

we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations.

Whoring is like military service, Ira—okay in the upper brackets, not so good lower down.

A man who bets on greed and dishonesty won't be wrong too often.

The Society for Creative Euthanasia

But does Man have any "right" to spread through the universe? Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive, and (so far) the ability, against all competition. Unless one accepts that, anything one says about morals, war, politics—you name it—is nonsense. Correct morals arise from knowing what Man is—not what do-gooders

Sir, every nation is capable of atrocities, including our own.

educational" killings

Whores perform the same function as priests, Ira, but far more thoroughly.

Won't discuss bookkeeping this firm used. Since Mike ran everything, was not corrupted by any tinge of honesty.

You see, they assumed that Man has a moral instinct." "Sir? I thought—But he does! I have." "No, my dear, you have a cultivated conscience, a most carefully trained one. Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not—and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.

The quickest way I know to break a person is to give him or her two sets of contradicting values—which is exactly what we do, in modern culture, with our Sunday and Monday moralities. We are taught by Christianity to follow a set of values that are almost entirely disregarded in everyday business life. How is a person to cope?

The function of law and theology are the same: to keep the poor from taking back by violence what the rich have stolen by cunning.

The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.

An eye for an eye, Seamus said, Do you know that way of it, doctor? An eye for an eye, we say. An eye for an eye—it's our whole law and religion. An eye for an eye, until we all go fooken blind.

How the Feds ever acquired the power to decide how much pain a sick person must suffer before dying remains legally obscure. The Constitution certainly never granted such sadistic power to any part of the government.

None of Dr. Leary's most important studies have either suffered refutation or enjoyed confirmation, because enacted law — statutes enacted after and because of Dr. Leary's research — makes it a crime for any other psychologists or psychiatrists to replicate such research. I know you've heard that the Inquisition ended in 1819, but in many areas of psychotherapy and medicine, the U.S. government has taken up where the Vatican left off.

Researchers don't do certain kinds of research because they don't want to get thrown into San Quentin, as happened to Dr. Leary.

Confucius (as the barbarians call him) also taught that, "When the government is honest, the people will learn honesty by example; when the government is crooked, the people will learn to be thieves also.

The obedient always think about themselves as virtuous, rather than cowardly.