Garrett Hardin Quotes

Since the nature of people is bad, to become corrected they must be taught by teachers and to be orderly they must acquire ritual and moral principles.

Society doesn't have values. People have values.

It would be easier for me to reject all established values, if I knew what they were.

There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not always call itself by that name.

Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown,--or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws.

Justice is a moral virtue, merely because it has that tendency to the good of mankind, and indeed is nothing but an artificial invention to that purpose. The same may be said of allegiance, of the laws of nations, of modesty, and of good manners. All these are mere human contrivances for the interest of society.

Social conservatives say who drives the bus.

Japan functions on the basis of everyone sharing certain assumptions, where each person knows his part in a larger whole. The foreigner sits outside and is threatening. If he comes in, that's the most threatening of all.

Bitter experience has taught us how fundamental our values are and how great the mission they represent.

Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.

I don't like overt traditionalism.

I'll never go against my morals.

You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

How do you rebel in a family of rebels?

Protestant Christianity ... tutored the first generations of Americans. It provided what we today would call the value system of the society.

Major religions usually remain major because they sanctify whatever is the social stricture of the day.

I was probably the only revolutionary ever referred to as "cute.

I don't think morality can be decided on the private level. I think you need public guidance and public support for a moral consensus. The average person has to know instinctively, without thinking too much about it, how he should raise his children.

We find the people to be no better than their laws.

The permissive society has been allowed to become a dirty phrase. A better phrase is the civilized society.

History requires us to judge the figures of the past not by our moral standards but by those of the ages in which they lived and worked.

I do my research, and if I'm supporting something, then it's because it aligns with me morally and ethically.

Conservatism and respectability have their values, certainly; but has not the unconventional its values also?

I think there are some people who have this thing where, from the very beginning, some part of them rejects convention.

Even though I did things which were not in accordance with the society's norms, deep down, I am an orthodox woman.