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Ethics Quotes


"If you can cull an animal, or kill a human , and sleep well, does not mean you are any more well than a sick animal."


"This point is often missed by evangelical feminists. They conclude that a difference in function necessarily involves a difference in essence; i.e., if men are in authority over women, then women must be inferior. The relationship between Christ and the Father shows us that this reasoning is flawed. One can possess a different function and still be equal in essence and worth. Women are equal to men in essence and in being; there is no ontological distinction, and yet they have a different function or role in church and home. Such differences do not logically imply inequality or inferiority, just as Christ's subjection to the Father does not imply His inferiority."


"It isn't a natural thing to keep on worrying about the morality of one's material prosperity. These are proclivities superinduced by modern conditions of the conscience. There is a natural resistance in every healthy human being to such distressful heart-searchings."


"Greed makes one want to get blessings without qualifying for it."


"But there are not two laws, that was the next thing I thought I understood, not two laws, one for the healthy, another for the sick, but one only to which all must bow, rich and poor, young and old, happy and sad. He was eloquent. I pointed out that I was not sad. That was a mistake. Your papers, he said, I knew it a moment later. Not at all, I said, not at all. Your papers! he cried. Ah my papers."


"Everything is useful which contributes to fix in the principles and practices of virtue."



"Absolute values are the things that are important whether you like them or not. Relative values depend on social contexts and personal preferences and conditions of life. Our current market system pursues relative transient values at the cost of absolute lasting values."


"Sometimes you will do good things and not get an acknowledgement for it. Don't let that dishearten you, the world is a better place with your good deeds."


"If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it."


"The source of everything respectable in man either as an intellectual or as a moral being namely, that his errors are corrigible."


"Consider intentions carefully. Karma gives a damn about ego, awards allegiance to none, and its justice is truly blind."


"As no one can be just without love, so no one can truly report without understanding."


"He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ."



"I have a yearning for my beautiful country, and I love its people because of their misery. But if my people rose, simulated by plunder and motivated by what they call "patriotic spirit" to murder, and invaded my neighbour's country, then upon the committing of any human atrocity I would hate my people and my country."


"Now I need to speak directly and with compassion to those who have already pushed open the door of premarital sex. The monster has been released. You've lost your virginity and may have been sexually active for years. Perhaps you've been carrying a load of guilt for doing what you knew was wrong."


"When you look away from a homeless person, you diminish their humanity and your own."



"Conscience is the manifestation of our divine nature, the absolute truthfulness that we all have inside, that resides beyond the instinctive desire to survive."


"Not responding is a response--we are equally responsible for what we don't do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle."


"I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that."


"If there were no goodness in people, mankind would still be confined to loping across a Savannah somewhere on Earth, watching the elephants rule, or some other more compassionate species."



"MamA believed in loyalty above all, even at the cost of self-denial. She also believed it was always best to tell the truth, to tell it plainly, without fanfare, and the more disagreeable the truth, the sooner you had to tell it."


"No, monsieur, returned Monte Cristo "upon the simple condition that they should respect myself and my friends. Perhaps what I am about to say may seem strange to you, who are socialists, and vaunt humanity and your duty to your neighbor, but I never seek to protect a society which does not protect me, and which I will even say, generally occupies itself about me only to injure me; and thus by giving them a low place in my esteem, and preserving a neutrality towards them, it is society and my neighbor who are indebted to me."


"He may have as strong a sense of what would be right, as you can have, without being so equal under particular circumstances to act up to it.""Then, it would not be so strong a sense. If it failed to produce equal exertion, it could not be an equal conviction."


"The Master said, "I have not seen a person who loved virtue, or onewho hated what was not virtuous. He who loved virtue, would esteemnothing above it. He who hated what is not virtuous, would practicevirtue in such a way that he would not allow anything that is notvirtuous to approach his person."Is any one able for one day to apply his strength to virtue? I havenot seen the case in which his strength would be insufficient."Should there possibly be any such case, I have not seen it."


"A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood."



"We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it."


"Give a truly good person power, and they're still a good person. Give a bad person power, and they're still a bad person. The question is always about the person in between. The one that isn't evil, or good, but just ordinary. You don't always know what an ordinary person is like on the inside."


"Try to be pleasant to one another, get plenty of fresh air, read a good book now and then, depose your government when it suspends the free press, try to use the mechanism of the state to adjudicate fairly and employ diplomatic means wherever possible to avoid armed conflict."


"A man goes to a foreign country and kills somebody who's not aggressing against him; in a Hawaiian shirt he's a criminal, in a green costume he's a hero who gets a parade and a pension. So that, as a culture, we remain in a state of moral insanity. To point out these contradictions to people in society is to be labeled insane. This is how insane society remains, that anybody who points out logical opposites in the most essential human topic of ethics, is considered to be insane."


"I think that's shameful, even if it's just a story, to propose an afterlife for evil... Any afterlife notion is a manipulation and a sop. It's shameful the way the unionists and the pagans both keep talking up hell for intimidation and the airy Other Land for reward."


"Unless a man becomes the enemy of an evil, he will not even become its slave but rather its champion."


"A good conscience is eight parts of courage."


"All that which proceeds from man's independent ego is good. All that which proceeds from man's dependence upon men is evil."


"In humility imitate Jesus and Socrates."
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