Ethics and Morality

Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.

If you hate your enemies, you will contract such a vicious habit of mind, as by degrees will break out upon those who are your friends, or those who are indifferent to you.

Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littlenesses, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.

A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes there is no virtue but on his own side.

As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.

That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.

Prejudice is the reason of fools.

He flattered himself on being a man without any prejudices; and this pretension itself is a very great prejudice.

Our nation is waging a war on a radical network of terrorists—not on a religion, and not a civilization. As we wage this war to defend our principles, we must live up to those principles ourselves. And one of the deepest commitments of America is tolerance. No one should be treated unkindly because of the color of their skin or the content of their creed. No one should be unfairly judged by appearance or ethnic background, or religious faith.

Prejudice is opinion without judgement.

What a sad era when it is easier to smash an atom than a prejudice.

We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n’ani ji onwe ya : ‘He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.’

Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.

It’s an universal law—intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

Prejudice is the child of ignorance.

If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however often Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

What a man had rather were true he more readily believes.

In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.

It is vain to find fault with those arts of deceiving, wherein men find pleasure to be deceived.

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

There is a great danger that [the Internet] becomes a place where untruths start to spread more than truths.