Ethics and Morality

[ Requesting aides to resist exposure of Watergate scandal :] I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up or anything else, if it’ll save it—save the plan.

The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.

What can largely be achieved by punishment, in man or beast, is the increase of fear, the intensification of intelligence, the mastering of desires: punishment tames man in this way but does not make him “better”—we would be more justified in asserting the opposite.

Every tradition now continually grows more venerable the farther away its origin lies and the more this origin is forgotten; the respect paid to it increases from generation to generation, the tradition at last becomes holy and evokes awe and reverence; and thus the morality of piety is in any event a much older morality than that which demands unegoistic actions.

I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here.

They have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters.

Hollywood’s a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.

Il faut manger pour vivre et non pas vivre pour manger .

Be kind to everyone on the way up; you’ll meet the same people on the way down.

Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.

How long will the human race sweat under the superstition that, in order to be happy and useful and intelligent, it is necessary to believe in things? What nonsense indeed! Human progress consists, not in acquiring beliefs, but in getting rid of them.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.

If you let people follow their feelings, they will be able to do good. This is what is meant by saying that human nature is good.

I would prefer not to.

It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.

All erroneous ideas, all poisonous weeds, all ghosts and monsters, must be subjected to criticism; in no circumstance should they be allowed to spread unchecked.

The extermination camps, in endeavoring to turn man into a beast, intimated that it is not life alone which makes him man.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.

A minimum of comfort is necessary for the practice of virtue.

Relativity applies to physics, not ethics.