Ethics and Morality

Right is right even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.

The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.

I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.

To educate a person in the mind but not in morals is to educate a menace to society.

Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.

So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

Without freedom there can be no morality.

In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.

Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.

If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

Compassion is the basis of morality.

Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

The higher the buildings, the lower the morals.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.

To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.

I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.

Morality is the weakness of the brain.