Ethics and Morality

Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive

Evil is unspectacular and always human, And shares our bed and eats at our own table.

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.

 

Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it.

A just cause is not ruined by a few mistakes.

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.

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

I respect Lenin as a man who gave all his energy, at a total sacrifice of his personal life, to dedicating himself to the realization of socialist justice. I don’t consider his methods appropriate. But one thing is certain: Men such as he are the guardians and renewers of mankind’s conscience.

Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded That all the Apostles would have done as they did.

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.

 

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.

The path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships.

Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.

The highest form of doing good is like water; water benefits all things but does not seek anything (for itself).

If war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful.

I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I canstand any society. All that I care to know isthat a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.

Usura slayeth the child in the wombIt stayeth the young man’s courtingIt hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom CONTRA NATURAM

God made man, without man’s consent, andmade his nature, too; made it vicious instead of angelic, and then said, Be angelic, or I will punish you and destroy you. But no matter, God is responsible for everything man does, all the same; He can’t get around that fact.There is only one Criminal, and it is not man.

What is robbing a bank compared with founding a bank?

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

World history is the world’s court. 2

 

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.

[Christian nations are the most enlightenedand progressive] in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.

A country where men despise sex, and live for it.