Quotes About Ethics

There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might even be the most immoral desire a man can possess.

Prudery is a form of selfishness, a means of self-protection made necessary by the strength of one's own desires.

They had laid the tender, down-ruffled little bird on a platter and appeared now to be pondering a way to eat out its heart without causing it distress.

My reason for proposing the game also lay in my inverted sense of social duty: in short, I felt that I must not fawn upon the girls, but must somehow give them a hard time.

And at the time it had not been the flames against which they fought, but against human relationships, against loves and hatreds, against reason, against property. At the time, like the crew of a wrecked ship, they had found themselves in a situation where it was permissible to kill one person in order that another might live.

To defile yourself, yet not really be defiled—that's true purity. If you're fastidious about defilement, you're not going to do anything. You'll never become a real man

It's not so much the harming of people's bodies I find objectionable, but of their hearts.

Perché siamo giunti a una società del genere? Perché viviamo in un'era in cui tutto ciò che era puro è stato contaminato?

En la vida trazamos el rumbo hacía el que pensamos que es el mal menor, pero la satisfacción que nos procura este instante se mezcla con el placer de humillar nuestros deseos más ardientes y más dificiles de colmar, en el fondo del corazón, y nos contentamos con decirnos que es un mal menor.

Yo siempre me había sentido orgullosa de mi moral y empecé a pensar que todo aquello que rodeaba al sexo no hacía más que embrutecer y empequeñecer a los seres humanos.

Cómo soportar una época que ha manchado todo lo que en otros tiempos era sagrado?

Why, why?" he thought, gritting his teeth. "Why are people not allowed to do what is most beautiful, when ugly, shoddy acts, acts for the sake of gain, are all freely allowed?

Böse Absichten reisen nicht so weit wie gute. (S.37, Leuchtturmwärter)

We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.

of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.

I want to create no matter what methods I have to use. And you want to steal no matter what methods you have to use. Given that which of us is the greater sinner?

In this situation however, I have to wonder...which of us is the sinner?

Answer this for me. In order to protect something, your loved ones end up shedding blood. Is it worth it? Is it really the right thing to do? Is it necessary? Please. Answer me. (Sarasa)

You can two-time satan But you can't lick the Holy Ghost.

The best that we can hope for in this life is that we shall not have sons and grandsons of whom we need to be ashamed.

Morality doesn't mean 'following divine commands'. It means 'reducing suffering'. Hence in order to act morally, you don't need to believe in any myth or story. You just need to develop a deep appreciation of suffering.

Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. The domestication of animals was founded on a series of brutal practices that only became crueller with the passing of the centuries.

Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change.

You want to know how super-intelligent cyborgs might treat ordinary flesh-and-blood humans? Better start by investigating how humans treat their less intelligent animal cousins. It's not a perfect analogy, of course, but it is the best archetype we can actually observe rather than just imagine.