Ethics and Morality

The greater man the greater courtesy.

It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow; The rest is all but leather or prunella.

And trust me not at all or all in all.

 

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

Many a crown shines spotless now That yet was deeply sullied in the winning.

 

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.

 

A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to theirParents, or the Country, and for Making ThemBeneficial to the Public.

Oh, my friends, that your self be in your deed as the mother is in her child - let that be your word concerning virtue!

The Family is a petty despotism; . . . a school in which men learn to despise women and women to mistrust men (much more than is necessary); a slaughterhouse for children (the firstborn succumbing to unskilled treatment, the lastborn to neglect). . . . Unfortunately, we cannot as yet do without it; and therefore we put a good face on the matter by conferring upon it the conventional attribute of sacredness, and impudently proclaiming it the source of all the virtues it has well-nigh killed in us.

The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.

Kind hearts are more than coronets,

 

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning, concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

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

Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.

’Tis only noble to be good. Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood.

 

His honour rooted in dishonour stood,

 

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.

Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive

A just cause is not ruined by a few mistakes.

Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it.

In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin, Before polygamy was made a sin.

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.

 

All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good; And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.