Ethics and Morality

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

We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

 

Kind hearts are more than coronets,

 

And trust me not at all or all in all.

 

His honour rooted in dishonour stood,

 

With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter’s heart.

 

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

 

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

 

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.

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.

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

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

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

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.

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

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

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.

 

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.

 

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.

 

It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

 

It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take those differences into account.