Ethics and Morality

Force always attracts men of low morality.

Do not wait for the last judgement. It comes every day.

A hungry man is not a free man.

 

These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others.

Reprove your friend in secret and praise him openly.

A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

It is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.

Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

Never ruin an apology with an excuse

He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled.

No one loves the man whom he fears.

He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.

As you cannot do what you want, want what you can do.

We should render a service to a friend to bind him closer to us, and to an enemy in order to make a friend of him.

Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still .entangled with the desire for ownership.

The trouble is that everyone talks about reforming others, and no one thinks about reforming himself.

A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.

 

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.

 

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

 

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.

 

The government ought not to use evidence obtained and only obtainable, by a criminal act. . . . For my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the Government should play an ignoble part.