Krzysztof Kieslowski Quotes

It seems difficult, sometimes, to believe that there was a time when sentiments now become habitual, sentiments that imply not only the original imperative of conduct, but the original metaphysic of living, were by no means altogether habitual.

Ethics is a fluid term ...It's the standards by which a civilized society lives.

People drift from generation to generation, and the morally unthinkable becomes thinkable as the years move on.

Change marriage and you change the world. Convince people that government, not God, lays down the rules for marriage, and they will believe more strongly that they determine right and wrong, that not even the world's rulers are subject to a higher authority.

We seemed to be drifting as a society - losing touch with the basic concepts of right and wrong.

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

People are dynamic. They change, and soon as there are enough of you, things change [for a whole society].

My friends, all I'm trying to say is that if we are to go forward today, we've got to go back and rediscover some mighty precious values that we've left behind. That's the only way that we would be able to make of our world a better world, and to make of this world what God wants it to be and the real purpose and meaning of it.

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exulted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the highest virtues.

I think, like most people, my moral values tend to be pretty fuzzy.

People resemble still more the time in which they live, than they resemble their fathers.

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

The Human moral keyboard is limited ... there's nothing you can play on it that hasn't been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.

Whatever efforts one may make, one must revert to the realization that religion is the real basis of morality; religion is the real and perceptible purpose within us, which alone, can turn aside our attention from things. ... The science of morality can no more teach human beings to be honest, in all the magnificence of this word, than geometry can teach one how to draw.

After I won the title, I was confronted with the real world. People do not behave naturally anymore - hypocrisy is everywhere.

Moral standards cannot be changed by battle and cannot be changed by ballot.

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.

That's the thing about a folk tale: It is always addressing incredibly key issues about how you should live and what the right thing to do is, which is really what I'm the most interested in - like the questions that religion takes on. And I think that, for those of us that aren't religious, we need, or I need, art that stimulates the same kind of thinking about what it is to be a mensch, or a good man, things like that.

The people of Israel, like those of the United States, are imbued with a religious faith and a sense of moral values

The only guide to man is his conscience.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.

religion and morality are a much better whip to keep people in submission than even the club and the gun.

The Left has never been comfortable with the notion that values are more determinitive than socioeconomic factors in human behavior

And usually I'm not watching the screen. I'm kind of sitting and looking off to the side, spying on people to see what they react to' cause it's - as Joe Ranft used to say, you know, animation is like telling a joke and waiting for three years to see if anyone laughs

The soul is no longer honored as it once was, but it still keeps appetite from being the measure of all things.