Max Lerner Quotes

The content of scientific theory itself offers no moral foundation for the personal conduct of life.

I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

I read these words which are the sum of all moral philosophy, and which cut short all the disputes of the casuists: When in doubt if an action is good or bad, refrain.

Most men are more willing to indulge in easy vices than to practise laborious virtues.

Every man prefers virtue, when there is not some strong incitement to transgress its precepts.

Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?

He who is a slave to his stomach seldom worships God.

What makes resisting temptation difficult for many people is they don't want to discourage it completely.

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

We may not have demon fathers dangling offers of infernal power before us, but everyone understands what it means to struggle with temptation or resist the urge to give in to our baser natures.

The more you build your life on principle and less on personality - yours or others - the straighter will be your course.

No temptation can ever be measured by the value of its object.

Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one.

I have a strong head on my shoulders... I've always been grounded. People would think not because of who I am, but I've always been raised with that sense of morals from my dad and my mother.

You may, if you are an old-fashioned schoolmaster, wish to consider yourself full of universal benevolence and at the same time derive great pleasure from caning boys. In order to reconcile these two desires you have to persuade yourself that caning

The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That's how most people thought.

Right and wrong as moral principles do not change. They are applicable and reliable determinants whether the situations with which we deal are simple or complicated. There is always a right and wrong to every question which requires our solution.

It's immoral to steal, but you can take things.

As to the permanent interest of individuals in the aggregated interests of the community, and in the proverbial maxim, that honesty is the best policy, present temptation is often found to be an overmatch for those considerations.

Men who have lost their conviction of what is good and what is bad find themselves without a sextant to check their position by. We are in the position of a man with an elaborate camping kit who finds himself lost in the woods without his matches; to kindle a fire he has to resort to the stratagems of the caveman. We fall back through generations into the oldest terrors and confusions of the race.

The love of property and consciousness of right and wrong have conflicting places in our organization, which often makes a man's course seem crooked, his conduct a riddle.

Evil, as evil, can never be chosen; and though evil is often the effect of our own choice, yet we never desire it but under the appearance of an imaginary good.

Every one of us ... knows better than he practices, and recognizes a better law than he obeys.

Her lord father had taught her never to steal, but it was growing harder to remember why.

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.