William Hazlitt Quotes

Many people will automatically develop a sort of selective morality. They will have one set of ethics—the one they were taught as children and been used to all their lives—for judging their selves and their friends. They will have another, and a much lower one, for the President of the United States.

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 think that as human beings we tend to compartmentalize, and we have a selective morality based on the situation we're in.

Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.

I don't really believe in evil at all.

There's no good guys and bad guys.

Relativity must replace absolutism in the realm of morals as well as in the spheres of physics and biology.

Each man must grant himself … the morality that suits him.

A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing, and, as the judgment, so also the conscience may be erroneous.

In those days [after Samson's death] there was no king in Israel, but every man did what was right in his own eyes.

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.

We may pretend that we're basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.

The ages of greatest public spirit are not always eminent for private virtue.

Every man has his price.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

President Trump's critics call him an immoral lout. By strict moral standards, so are we all.

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

A man given to vice is always an idealist.

I had always thought that the 'good,' and the 'bad' and the 'violent' did not exist in any absolute, essential sense. It seemed to me interesting to demystify these adjectives in the setting of a Western. An assassin can display a sublime altruism while a good man can kill with total indifference.

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.

If one starts with an impersonal beginning, the answer to morals eventually turns out to be the assertion that there are no morals.

I lay down the Position, That whatever a Conscience well directed allows us to do for the Advancement of Truth, an erroneous Conscience will warrant for advancing a suppos'd Truth.

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart...

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

There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.