Ethics and Morality

I will have this done, so I order it done; let my will replace reasoned judgement.

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.

No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades—that of government.

Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.

Of all the sources of human pride, mere wealth is the basest and most vulgar-minded. Real gentlemen are almost invariably above this low feeling.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

The value systems of those with access to power and of those far removed from such access cannot be the same. The viewpoint of the privileged is unlike that of the underprivileged.

Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.

Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer ‘Present’ or ‘Not Guilty.’

There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men.

What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

A people that elect corrupt politicians, impostors, thieves and traitors are not victims . . . but accomplices.”—George Orwell, English author and essayist (1903 – 1950), attributed “He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

Prejudice and self-sufficiency naturally proceed from inexperience of the world and ignorance of mankind.

As those who believe in the visibility of ghosts can easily see them, so it is always easy to see repulsive qualities in those we despise and hate.

Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.

If you hate your enemies, you will contract such a vicious habit of mind, as by degrees will break out upon those who are your friends, or those who are indifferent to you.

Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littlenesses, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.

A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes there is no virtue but on his own side.

As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.