Ethics and Morality

The TV business . . . is normally perceived assome kind of cruel and shallow money trenchthrough the heart of the journalism industry, along plastic hallway where thieves and pimpsrun free and good men die like dogs, for nogood reason.

A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to theirParents, or the Country, and for Making ThemBeneficial to the Public.

Ingratitude is among them a capital Crime, . . . For they reason thus: that whoever makes ill Returns to his Benefactor, must needs be a common Enemy to the rest of Mankind, from whom he hath received no Obligation; andtherefore such a Man is not fit to live.

It is computed, that eleven Thousand Personshave, at several Times, suffered Death, ratherthan submit to break their Eggs at the smallerEnd. Many large Volumes have been publishedupon this Controversy: But the Books of the Big-Endians have been long forbidden, andthe whole Party rendered incapable by Law ofholding Employments.

[ On lawyers :] I said there was a Society of Men among us, bred up from their Youth in theArt of proving by Words multiplied for thePurpose, that White is Black , and Black is White , according as they are paid. To this Society allthe rest of the People are Slaves.

It is a Maxim among these Lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again.

If Heaven had looked upon riches to be avaluable thing, it would not have given them tosuch a scoundrel.

A. A violent order is disorder; and

Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality.

I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich.

I have taken great care not to deride, bewail, or execrate human actions, but to understand them.

The law is the survival of the fittest . . . . The law is not the survival of the “better” or the “stronger,” if we give to those words any thing like their ordinary meanings. It is the survival of those which are constitutionally fittest to thrive under the conditions in which they are placed; and very often that which, humanly speaking, is inferiority, causes the survival.

We speak of war gods, but not of mathematician gods, poet or painter gods, or inventor gods. Nobody has ever called me a god; I am at best a sage. We worship all the conquerors, but have only one Prince of Peace, who was horribly put to death, and if he lived in these islands, would have some difficulty in getting exempted from military service as a conscientious objector.

We all profess the deepest regard for liberty; but no sooner does anyone claim to exercise it than we declare with horror that we are in favor of liberty but not of licence, and demand indignantly whether true freedom can ever mean freedom to do wrong, to preach sedition and immorality, to utter blasphemy. Yet this is exactly what liberty does mean.

If you demand my authorities for this and that, I must reply that only those who have never hunted up the authorities as I have believe that there is any authority who is not contradicted flatly by some other authority.

I have not wasted my life trifling with literary fools in taverns as [Samuel] Johnson did when he should have been shaking England with the thunder of his spirit.

On Christmas Day it is proclaimed that Christianity established peace on earth and good will towards men. Next day the Christian, with refreshed soul, goes back to the manufacture of submarines and torpedoes.

The Family is a petty despotism; . . . a school in which men learn to despise women and women to mistrust men (much more than is necessary); a slaughterhouse for children (the firstborn succumbing to unskilled treatment, the lastborn to neglect). . . . Unfortunately, we cannot as yet do without it; and therefore we put a good face on the matter by conferring upon it the conventional attribute of sacredness, and impudently proclaiming it the source of all the virtues it has well-nigh killed in us.

The man of business . . . goes on Sunday to the church with the regularity of the village blacksmith, there to renounce and abjure before his God the line of conduct which he intends to pursue with all his might during the following week.

[ Question asked by Shaw to presidential candidate Michael Dukakis regarding his wife :] Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?

If we cannot eschew hatred, at least let us eschew group hatred.

Whatever is not forbidden is permitted.

The most ominous conflict of our time is the difference of opinion, of outlook, between men of letters, historians, philosophers, the so-called humanists, on the one side and scientists on the other. The gap cannot but increase because of the intolerance of both and the fact that science is growing by leaps and bounds.

If you give to a thief he cannot steal from you, and then he is no longer a thief.