#moral

People who wouldn't dream of drowning a puppy in a barrel full of water think nothing of killing a fish the same slow way. ↗

— Karen Traviss

#moral #wess-har #dreams

Some false representations contravene the law; some do not. ... The sensibilities of no two men are the same. Some would refuse to sell property without carefully explaining all about its merits and defects, and putting themselves in the purchasers' place and inquiring if he himself would buy under the circumstances. But such men never would be prosperous merchants. ↗

— Clarence Darrow

#honesty #idealistic #moral-clarity #success #successful

Here the contention is not just that the new Darwinian paradigm can help us realize whichever moral values we happen to choose. The claim is that the new paradigm can actually influence — legitimately — our choice of basic values in the first place. Some Darwinians insist that such influence can never be legitimate. What they have in mind is the naturalistic fallacy, whose past violation has so tainted their line of work. But what we're doing here doesn't violate the naturalistic fallacy. Quite the opposite. By studying nature — by seeing the origins of the retributive impulse — we see how we have been conned into committing the naturalistic fallacy without knowing it; we discover that the aura of divine truth surrounding retribution is nothing more than a tool with which nature — natural selection — gets us to uncritically accept its "values." Once this revelation hits norm, we are less likely to obey this aura, and thus less likely to commit the fallacy. ↗

— Robert Wright

#evolution #morality #nature

And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#moral #hypocrisy

If there was a reason why he preferred the liberal tendency to the conservative one (also held to by many of his circle), it was not because he found the liberal tendency more sensible, but it more closely suited his manner of life. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#morality #motivation #life

Nature has made a mistake in the choice of my sexuality and I must do a life-long penance for it, for the moral power to suffer the unavoidable with dignity is lost. ↗

— Richard von Krafft-Ebing

#gender #homosexuality #lesbianism #morality #nature

Sometimes I wonder about good and evil. If the villain wins, isn't he heralded as the hero? I've tried so hard to be good since that day, but sometimes I wonder whether it's even worth it. After all, to be the hero, I have to win. ↗

— Sarah C. Yung

#morality #supernatural #teens #yalit #young-adult

The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with. Scruples are alien to the black panther. Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions. The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations. The self-critical jackal does not exist. The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly live as they live and are glad of it. The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilos but in other respects it is light. There is nothing more animal-like than a clear conscience on the third planet of the Sun. ↗

— Wisława Szymborska

#humanity #life #morality #self-deprecation #experience

There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules ↗

— Albert Camus

#morality #ethics

Assassination is almost always unthinkable to moral, thinking men until after a holocaust has come and gone. ↗

— Caitlín R. Kiernan

#morality #pragmitism #men