Ethics and Morality

One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

Half of the harm that is done in this world Is due to people who want to feel important.

All rights tend to declare themselves absolute to their logical extreme. Yet all in fact are limited by the neighborhood of principles of policy which are other than those on which the particular right is founded, and which become strong enough to hold their own when a certain point is reached.

‘Freedom from fear’ could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights.

It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow citizens.

I will have this done, so I order it done; let my will replace reasoned judgement.

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.

No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades—that of government.

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.

Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

Of all the sources of human pride, mere wealth is the basest and most vulgar-minded. Real gentlemen are almost invariably above this low feeling.

The value systems of those with access to power and of those far removed from such access cannot be the same. The viewpoint of the privileged is unlike that of the underprivileged.

Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.

Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.

There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men.

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer ‘Present’ or ‘Not Guilty.’

What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

A people that elect corrupt politicians, impostors, thieves and traitors are not victims . . . but accomplices.”—George Orwell, English author and essayist (1903 – 1950), attributed “He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

Prejudice and self-sufficiency naturally proceed from inexperience of the world and ignorance of mankind.

As those who believe in the visibility of ghosts can easily see them, so it is always easy to see repulsive qualities in those we despise and hate.