Thomas Sowell Quotes

There are many religions, but there is only one morality.

I want to give moral relativism the good spanking it deserves.

Either what we hold to be right and good and true IS right and good and true, for all mankind, or we're just another robber tribe.

The problem of good as it faces the atheist is this: Nature, which is the nuts-and-bolts reality for the atheist, has no values and thus can offer no grounding for good and evil. Values on the atheist view are subjective and contingent.

To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles.

How are you going to teach virtue if you teach the relativity of all ethical ideas? Virtue, if it implies anything at all, implies an ethical absolute. A person whose idea of what is proper varies from day to day can be admired for his broadmindedness, but not for his virtue.

You cannot have a boundary-less existence, because your neighbor has his own boundaries, and who is going to give you the ethics between the two boundaries? If there is no objective moral law, relativism will take hold, and relativism ultimately will lead to self-destruction.

Moral relativism has a reputation for being compassionate, caring and humane, but it is an extremely useful philosophy for tyrants.

Moral relativism says morality is relative, not absolute, I want to show moral relativism, in its popular form, is logically incoherent.

The hero can never be a relativist.

There being no absolute and universal standard of right, terrorism must be held to be wrong in every case.

All universal moral principles are idle fancies.

I think evil is very relative.

It's simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.

Of God and Evil, there is nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common Rule of Good and Evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves.

Without a clear moral vision, we devolve into moral relativism, and from there, into oblivion.

I don't believe in good people and bad people.

We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becomes a world without value.

Man is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong. However, we must not convert an inclination into an axiom that just as man's perceptions cannot operate outside time and space, so his motivations cannot operate outside expediency; that man can never transcend his own self. The most fatal trap into which thinking may fall is the equation of existence and expediency.

Never presume yours is a better morality.

I can only say that, while my own opinions as to ethics do not satisfy me, other people's satisfy me still less.

Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.

Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson.

If they [liberals] didn't believe we were mean spirited they couldn't stay liberal. They have to believe they mean better than us, but we don't have to believe that we mean better than them. We have to believe that we do better than them. We measure morality by what happens not what is intended.

The denial of an objective moral law, based on the compulsion to deny the existence of God, results ultimately in the denial of evil iteself.