Immanuel Kant Quotes

If you say morality is just what you like, you lose the metaphysical level of what in the history of philosophy is called 'categorical imperative.'

I don't believe in morality . I'm a disciple of Bernard Shaw.

I think that moral philosophy is useful for framing questions, but terrible at answering them. I think moral psychology is booming right now, and we're making a lot of progress on understanding how we actually work, what our moral nature is.

There is no such thing as good and bad in an absolute sense. There is only the good and bad- the harm in terms of happiness and suffering- that our thoughts and our actions do to ourselves and others.

I believe the only reality is how we treat each other. The morality comes from the absence of any grander scheme, not from the presence of any grander scheme.

Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.

If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.

To say murder is wrong is as much a statement of faith as 'I believe that God said murder is wrong' is a statement of faith

You think that you can judge what's good or evil from whether you enjoy doing it or not. You think that evil is what always appears in the form of a temptation, while good is what you never spontaneously want to do. I think this is all total rubbish, if you don't mind my saying so.

Good and evil - I don't believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil.

Mankind thinks either too much or too little of sin.

The so-called new morality is too often the old immorality condoned.

Dissent is morally neutral. You can correctly call yourself a dissident because you like to kick puppies, but at the end of the day, you're just a jerk who likes to kick puppies.

So you see, Good and Evil have the same face; it all depends on when they cross the path of each individual human being.

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.

I don't think there is a right or wrong anymore. Only horrible and not-quite-so-horrible.

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

What is a bad thing anyway? A bad thing is something that is different than what I want. Who gets to decide what the bad thing is? Jerry and Esther watched the mother bird lay her eggs in the nest, and then the neighbor's cat ate the baby bird. Esther said "bad cat!" And the cat said, "good bird!

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. This isn’t a good idea. This isn’t right.” “There’s all kinds of right,” he murmured. “On the spectrum, we’re still in the safe zone.” ... “Definitely right. Usually right,” Patch continued. “Mostly right. Maybe right.

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.

Hypocrisy is bad, but it's not the worst vice in the world. If I declared “murder is wrong” and then killed somebody, I would hope that the top count against me would be homicide, not hypocrisy. Liberal elites ' particularly in Hollywood ' believe that hypocrisy is the gravest sin in the world, which is why they advocate their own lifestyles for the entire world: Sleep with whomever you want, listen to your own instincts, be true to yourself, blah, blah, blah. Our fear of hypocrisy is forcing us to live in a world where gluttons are fine, so long as they champion gluttony.

Philosophy rests on a proposition that whatever is is right. Preaching begins by assuming that whatever is is wrong.

Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.

In philosophy class I think we finally decided that 'good' is an infinitely recursive term - it can't be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it's better than bad, though why it's better to be good than bad depends on how you define good, and on and on.

If some incarnation of evil as unambiguous as Hitler appeared again, I would have no moral qualms about killing the enemy. But in the modern world of moral murkiness, I prefer to keep my hands as clean of enemy blood as possible.