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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

On Christmas Day it is proclaimed that Christianity established peace on earth and good will towards men. Next day the Christian, with refreshed soul, goes back to the manufacture of submarines and torpedoes.

If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.

 

Man becomes man only by the intelligence, but he is man only by the heart.

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

The greater man the greater courtesy.

The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.