David Hume Quotes

Modern morality is all about perception.

There must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.

I didn't grow up with any concept of people being deviants unless they mistreated others.

That which is inhuman cannot be divine.

If "Thou shalt not covet," and "Thou shalt not steal," were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free.

Moral principles have lost their distinctiveness. For modern man, absolute right and absolute wrong are a matter of what the majority is doing.

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.

Whatsoever is the object of any man's Appetite or Desire; that is it which he for his part calleth Good: and the object of his Hate and Aversion, evil.

Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.

When men are inhuman, take care not to feel towards them as they do towards other humans.

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

Tolerance obviously does not disturb the distinction between right and wrong, or good and evil.

Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough.

Scopes isn’t on trial; civilization is on trial.

To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.

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.

Cruelty is the only sin.

It is generally understood that men don't aspire after the absolute right, but only to do about as well as the rest of the world.

Good and bad, I define these terms, quite clear, no doubt, somehow.

What is moral is what you feel good after.

But your mind is warped by an innate principle of general integrity, and, therefore, not accessible to the cool reasonings of family partiality, or a desire of revenge.

Our system is not only based on rules, but a series of self-restraints that we won't be as barbaric as we could be in competing for power because we know if we're all barbaric as we could be, the whole country and the whole society falls apart.

Humans are not really very humane.

For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.

The market has no morality