Quotes about Ethics

Are you sure?" asked the Savage. "Are you quite sure that the Edmund in that pneumatic chair hasn't been just as heavily punished as the Edmund who's wounded and bleeding to death?

Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears - that's what soma is.

That horrible Benito Hoover! And yet the man had meant well enough. Which only made it, in a way, much worse. Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.

We are given two choices—famine, pestilence and war on the one hand, birth control on the other.

Science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.

All too many Christians have behaved as though the devil were a first principle, on the same footing as god. They have paid more attention to evil and the problem of its eradication than to good and the methods by which individual goodness may be deepened, and the sum of goodness increased.

But the power problem has its roots in anatomy and biochemistry and temperament. Power has to be curbed on the legal and political levels; that's obvious. But it's also obvious that there must be prevention on the individual level. On the level of instinct and emotion, on the level of the glands and the viscera, the muscles and the blood. If I can ever find the time, I'd like to write a little book on human physiology in relation to ethics, religion, politics and law.

He would have liked to behave well, but he did not know how to stop behaving badly.

The spirit was a libertine, but the flesh and its affections were chaste.

A philosophy of work is essential if we would be whole men, holy men, healthy men, joyous men. A certain amount of goods is necessary for a man to lead a good life, and we have to make that kind of society where it is easier for men to be good.

The strong could make their own law, live their own lives; in fact, they were beyond good and evil. What was good and what was evil? It is easy enough to stifle conscience for a time. The satisfied flesh has its own law.

If it ever occurs to people to value the honour of the mind equally with the honour of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort.