Ethics and Morality

A hungry man is not a free man.

 

Force always attracts men of low morality.

A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

It is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.

Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

Do not wait for the last judgement. It comes every day.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

Never ruin an apology with an excuse

These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others.

No one loves the man whom he fears.

He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled.

Reprove your friend in secret and praise him openly.

He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.

As you cannot do what you want, want what you can do.

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

This case is decided upon an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain. If it were a question whether I agreed with that theory, I should desire to study it further and long before making up my mind. But I do not conceive that to be my duty, because I strongly believe that my agreement or disagreement has nothing to do with the right of a majority to embody their opinions in law.