Ethics and Morality

They have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters.

Hollywood’s a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.

Il faut manger pour vivre et non pas vivre pour manger .

Be kind to everyone on the way up; you’ll meet the same people on the way down.

Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.

How long will the human race sweat under the superstition that, in order to be happy and useful and intelligent, it is necessary to believe in things? What nonsense indeed! Human progress consists, not in acquiring beliefs, but in getting rid of them.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

If you let people follow their feelings, they will be able to do good. This is what is meant by saying that human nature is good.

A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.

I would prefer not to.

It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.

All erroneous ideas, all poisonous weeds, all ghosts and monsters, must be subjected to criticism; in no circumstance should they be allowed to spread unchecked.

The extermination camps, in endeavoring to turn man into a beast, intimated that it is not life alone which makes him man.

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.

Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.

A minimum of comfort is necessary for the practice of virtue.

Relativity applies to physics, not ethics.

Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.

A half-truth is the worst of all lies, because it can be defended in partiality.

The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

I'm not smart enough to lie.

The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.

People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.