Ethics and Morality

Men are so simple of mind, and so much dominated by their immediate needs, that a deceitful man will always find plenty who are ready to be deceived.

Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.

No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

There is nothing in the record of the past two years when both Houses of Congress have been controlled by the Republican Party which can lead any person to believe that those promises will be fulfilled in the future. They follow the Hitler line—no matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as truth.

Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

When one with honeyed words but evil mind persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.

Where is there dignity unless there is honesty?

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it.

Gossip is vice enjoyed vicariously— the sweet, subtle satisfaction without the risk.

The widespread interest in gossip is inspired, not by a love of knowledge but by malice: no one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it; it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.

Gossip is the art-form of the man and woman in the street, and the proper subject for gossip, as for all art, is the behavior of mankind.

Generosity lies less in giving much than in giving at the right moment.

What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more than the thing given.

That’s what I consider true generosity. You give your all and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.

The path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships.

There’s no system foolproof enough to defeat a sufficiently great fool.

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true.