Ethics and Morality

Many a crown shines spotless now That yet was deeply sullied in the winning.

 

If you want to know yourself, Just look how others do it; If you want to understand others, Look into your own heart.

 

World history is the world’s court. 2

 

Foolish men who accuse a woman mindlessly— you cannot even see you cause what you abuse.

 

Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small. 1

 

Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor.

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

You can’t make people good by Act of Parliament.

Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.

Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Wisdom is higher than a fool can reach.

The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

[ Punch line of joke about a scorpion stinging a frogthat is carrying him across a river despite the fact that this would result in both their deaths :] I can’t help it. It’s my nature.

Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give thewhite man nothing else. But the fact is, you gotto give ’em something. Either your money, your land, your woman, or your ass.

I want my attorney, my tailor, my valets, andeven my wife to believe in God, and I fancy that then I’ll be robbed and cuckolded less.

That generous maxim, that it is much moreprudence to acquit two persons, though actually guilty, than to pass sentence of condemnationon one that is virtuous and innocent.

[Christian nations are the most enlightenedand progressive] in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.

God made man, without man’s consent, andmade his nature, too; made it vicious instead of angelic, and then said, Be angelic, or I will punish you and destroy you. But no matter, God is responsible for everything man does, all the same; He can’t get around that fact.There is only one Criminal, and it is not man.

You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ’pinions is.

I would throw out the old maxim, “Mycountry, right or wrong,” and instead I would say, “My country when she is right.”

I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I canstand any society. All that I care to know isthat a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.