Quotes About Ethics

Why can't criminals be frank about what they're up to? All this disgusting idealistic hogwash-it makes one vomit.

When in doubt, always act on the assumption that people are more honorable than you have any solid reason for supposing they are.

Time and habit had taken the wrongness out of almost all the acts he had once thought sinful. He performed them as unenthusiastically as he would have performed the act of catching the morning train to the city.

the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?

Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they ahd been made for man, not as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them.

He let out the amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed.

The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people in a word—these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they're the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.

Alas, higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue, or higher political wisdom.

For the good that I would,'" he quoted, "'I do not; and the evil that I would not, that I do.'" "Who said that?" "The man who invented Christianity—St. Paul.

It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.

It isn't only art that's incompatible with happiness; it's also science. Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.

If you allowed yourselves to think of God, you wouldn't allow yourselves to be degraded by pleasant vices. You'd have a reason for bearing things patiently, for doing things with courage..

They had not yet learned to draw the significant but often very fine distinction between smut and pure science.

What we know depends also on what, as moral beings, we choose to make ourselves.

Lord Edward took a scientific interest in the sexual activities of axolotls and chickens, guinea pigs and frogs; but any reference to the corresponding activities of humans made him painfully uncomfortable.

operation undergone voluntarily for the good of Society, not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting to six months' salary";

Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many.

Cuanto mayores son los talentos de un hombre más grande es su poder de corromper a los demás.

Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas—that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!

In itself, no doubt, the natural and moderate satisfaction of the sexual instinct is a matter quite indifferent to morality. It is only in relation to something else that the satisfaction of a natural instinct can be said to be good or bad.

Cuanto mayores son los talentos de un hombre más grande es su poder de corromper a los demás. Y es mejor que sufra uno solo a que se corrompan muchos. (...) El asesino sólo mata al individuo, y, al fin y al cabo, ¿qué es un individuo? Podemos fabricar otro nuevo con la mayor facilidad; tantos como queramos.

You can't have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices.

Mindlessness and moral idiocy are not characteristically human attributes; they are symptoms of herd-poisoning.

the goddess of Applied Science has presented the world with another gift, more precious even than these—the means of dissociating love from propagation.