top of page
.png){kind=small}
"For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn't fair, and justice derives from that knowledge."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Ethics quotes
"The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble."
"By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally."
"At certain moments, the foot slips ; at others, the ground gives way. How many times had that conscience, furious for the right, grasped and overwhelmed him! How many times had truth, inexorable, planted her knee upon his breast! How many times, thrown to the ground by the light, had he cried to it for mercy!"
"Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices has never been more pressing-or more complicated-than it is today."
Explore more quotes by Tom Stoppard
"There are no commitments, only bargains. And they have to be made again every day. You think making a commitment is it. Finish. You think it sets like a concrete platform and it'll take any strain you want to put on it. You're committed. You don't have to prove anything. In fact you can afford a little neglect, indulge in a little bit of sarcasm here and there, isolate yourself when you want to. Underneath it's concrete for life. I'm a cow in some ways, but you're an idiot."
"It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them."
"A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself."
"We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else."
"When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process."
"A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty-and, by which definition, a philosopher-dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security."
"What freedom means, is being allowed to sing in my bath as loudly as will not interfere with my neighbour's freedom to sing a different tune in his."
bottom of page