Ethics and Morality

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

Beware of the community in which blasphemy does not exist: underneath, atheism runs rampant.

Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority.

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try' to be “consistent.”

We must not roughly smash other people’s idols because we know, or think we know, that they are of cheap human manufacture.

We are always making God our accomplice, that so we may legalize our own iniquities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity.

The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable. Good-breeding is surface-Christianity.

Government and co-operation are in all things the laws of life; anarchy and competition the laws of death.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible.

He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the power of being magnanimous.

A just cause is not ruined by a few mistakes.

No absolute is going to make the lion lie dow'n with the lamb: unless the lamb is inside.

Honesty pays, but it don’t seem to pay enough to suit a lot of people.

So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done.

The trouble is that everyone talks about reforming others, and no one thinks about reforming himself.

It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.

In battling evil, excess is good for he who is moderate in announcing the truth is presenting half-truth.

You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them.

They go forth with well-developed bodies, developed minds and undeveloped hearts. An undeveloped heart-not a cold one.

It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.

The difficulty in life is the choice.