Ethics and Morality

I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.

Kill reverence and you’ve killed the hero in man.

The day is not purer than the depths of my heart.

Outside of this cell we may have our oppressors, yes, but not inside. Here no one oppresses the other. The only thing that seems to disturb me . . . because I’m exhausted, or conditioned, or perverted . . . is that someone wants to be nice to me, without asking anything back for it.

The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.

Usura slayeth the child in the wombIt stayeth the young man’s courtingIt hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom CONTRA NATURAM

Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow;

[ Of Socrates :] Such, Echecrates, was the end of our comrade, who was, we may fairly say, of all those whom we knew in our time, the bravest and also the wisest and most upright man.

[ Socrates speaking :] Is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy?

[ Socrates speaking, describing the charge against him :] Socrates is guilty of corrupting the minds of the young, and of believing in deities of his own invention instead of the gods recognized by the state.

Was it worthy? Everything is worthy.

Mankind’s greatest error, the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

He [Kipling] sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

If there is a wrong thing to do, it will be done, infallibly. One has come to believe in that as if it were a law of nature.

The Communist and the Catholic are not saying the same thing, in a sense they are even saying opposite things, and each would gladly boil the other in oil if circumstances permitted; but from the point of view of an outsider they are very much alike.

Afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

However delicately it is disguised, charity is still horrible; there is a malaise, almost a secret hatred, between the giver and the receiver.

I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant.

Civilization is nothing else than the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.

I hope that . . . television, radio, and the press first recognize the great responsibility they have to report all the news and, second, recognize that they have a right and a responsibility, if they are against a candidate—give him the shaft. But also recognize, if they give him the shaft—put one lonely reporter on the campaign who will report what the candidate says, now and then.

[ On the Watergate scandal :] There can be no whitewash at the White House.