Ethics and Morality

The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,

Let humble Allen, with an awkward shame,

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,

And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,

Eye Nature’s walks, shoot Folly as it flies,

Some praise at morning what they blame at night;

Search then the Ruling Passion: There, alone,

’Tis use alone that sanctifies expense.

The ruling passion, be it what it will,

Die, and endow a college, or a cat.

Unlearn’d, he knew no schoolman’s subtle art,

You think this cruel? take it for a rule,

How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the sense,

He who cheats with an oath acknowledges that he is afraid of his enemy, but that he thinks little of God.

But if we are guided by me we shall believe that the soul is immortal and capable of enduring all extremes of good and evil, and so we shall hold ever to the upward way and pursue righteousness with wisdom always and ever.

The blame is his who chooses: God is blameless.

Can we devise one of those lies—the kind which crop up as the occasion demands, which we were talking about not so long ago—so that with a single noble lie we can indocrinate the rulers themselves, preferably, but at least the rest of the community?

And so with the objects of knowledge: these derive from the Good not only their power of being known, but their very being and reality; and Goodness is not the same thing as being, but even beyond being, surpassing it in dignity and power.

This was the end, Echekrates, of our friend; a man of whom we may say that of all whom we met at that time he was the wisest and justest and best.

Is that which is holy loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?

Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.