Ethics and Morality

Memory says: Want to do right? Don’t count on me.

Fay ce que vouldras.

A cynical, mercenary, demagogic, corrupt press will produce in time a people as base as itself.

A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser to-day than he was yesterday.

Party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.

The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,

Let humble Allen, with an awkward shame,

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,

And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,

Eye Nature’s walks, shoot Folly as it flies,

Some praise at morning what they blame at night;

Search then the Ruling Passion: There, alone,

’Tis use alone that sanctifies expense.

The ruling passion, be it what it will,

Unlearn’d, he knew no schoolman’s subtle art,

Die, and endow a college, or a cat.

You think this cruel? take it for a rule,

How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the sense,

He who cheats with an oath acknowledges that he is afraid of his enemy, but that he thinks little of God.

But if we are guided by me we shall believe that the soul is immortal and capable of enduring all extremes of good and evil, and so we shall hold ever to the upward way and pursue righteousness with wisdom always and ever.

The blame is his who chooses: God is blameless.

And so with the objects of knowledge: these derive from the Good not only their power of being known, but their very being and reality; and Goodness is not the same thing as being, but even beyond being, surpassing it in dignity and power.

Can we devise one of those lies—the kind which crop up as the occasion demands, which we were talking about not so long ago—so that with a single noble lie we can indocrinate the rulers themselves, preferably, but at least the rest of the community?

This was the end, Echekrates, of our friend; a man of whom we may say that of all whom we met at that time he was the wisest and justest and best.