Ethics and Morality

They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that mislike it, heresy: and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,

Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in,

Dort, wo man Bücher

In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.

Not all that tempts your wand’ring eyes

Forbad to wade through slaughter to a throne,

Never open the door to the least of evils, for many other, greater ones lurk outside.

And honour sinks where commerce long prevails.

When we take people, thou wouldst say, merely as they are, we make them worse; when we treat them as if they were what they should be, we improve them as far as they can be improved.

Die Tat ist alles, nichts der Ruhm.

We are all Adam’s children but silk makes the difference.

He that plants trees loves others beside himself.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

There is an invisible hand in politics that operates in the opposite direction to the invisible hand in the market. In politics, individuals who seek to promote only the public good are led by an invisible hand to promote special interests that it was no part of their intention to promote.

Necessity never made a good bargain.

Christianity has done a great deal for love by making a sin of it.

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art.

My tongue swore, but my mind’s unsworn. Hippolytus lamenting his breaking of an oath

Everything has two handles, by one of which it ought to be carried and by the other not.

The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.