Ethics and Morality

Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow;

[ Of Socrates :] Such, Echecrates, was the end of our comrade, who was, we may fairly say, of all those whom we knew in our time, the bravest and also the wisest and most upright man.

[ Socrates speaking :] Is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy?

[ Socrates speaking, describing the charge against him :] Socrates is guilty of corrupting the minds of the young, and of believing in deities of his own invention instead of the gods recognized by the state.

Was it worthy? Everything is worthy.

Mankind’s greatest error, the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

He [Kipling] sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

If there is a wrong thing to do, it will be done, infallibly. One has come to believe in that as if it were a law of nature.

The Communist and the Catholic are not saying the same thing, in a sense they are even saying opposite things, and each would gladly boil the other in oil if circumstances permitted; but from the point of view of an outsider they are very much alike.

Afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

However delicately it is disguised, charity is still horrible; there is a malaise, almost a secret hatred, between the giver and the receiver.

I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant.

Civilization is nothing else than the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.

I hope that . . . television, radio, and the press first recognize the great responsibility they have to report all the news and, second, recognize that they have a right and a responsibility, if they are against a candidate—give him the shaft. But also recognize, if they give him the shaft—put one lonely reporter on the campaign who will report what the candidate says, now and then.

[ Requesting aides to resist exposure of Watergate scandal :] I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up or anything else, if it’ll save it—save the plan.

[ On the Watergate scandal :] There can be no whitewash at the White House.

The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.

What can largely be achieved by punishment, in man or beast, is the increase of fear, the intensification of intelligence, the mastering of desires: punishment tames man in this way but does not make him “better”—we would be more justified in asserting the opposite.

Every tradition now continually grows more venerable the farther away its origin lies and the more this origin is forgotten; the respect paid to it increases from generation to generation, the tradition at last becomes holy and evokes awe and reverence; and thus the morality of piety is in any event a much older morality than that which demands unegoistic actions.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.

It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here.