Pierre Bayle Quotes

Conscience is better served by a myth.

Those who think it is permissible to tell white lies soon grow color-blind.

I don't tend to think in terms of a moral authority - be a good boy, do good things - more in terms of what feels right.

Let none of us delude himself by supposing that honesty is always the best policy. It is not.

In the world in which we live, truth is an ancillary virtue, but it shouldn't be.

Some people may believe that their conscience is enough to guide them not to lie, be deceitful or do the other things God has commanded us not to do. I disagree.

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

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.

What most men call their conscience is imaginary virtue switching left or right according to self-interest.

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

A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right and evil doesn't become good, just because it's accepted by a majority.

What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about 'right' and 'wrong,' or 'good' and 'evil,' and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?

When treating with liars, even an honest man must lie.

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.

It might or might not be right to kill, but sometimes it is necessary.

You're trying to be tricky. What's morality?" "It's the difference between what's right and what you can rationalize." "Must be a human thing." "Exactly.

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

There's no right or wrong just truthful or untruthful.

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

They don't subscribe to our sense of morality; they don't believe in an afterlife; they don't believe in a God or religion. And the only morality they recognize, therefore, is what will advance the cause or socialism.

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.

People seldom tell the truths that are worth telling. We ought to choose our truths as carefully as we choose our lies and to select our virtues with as much thought as we bestow upon the selection of our enemies.

If you are going to do something that you have to lie about, don't do it, it's very simple.

What you think in your own mind to be good, or what people of the world think is good, is not necessarily good.

A white lie is always pardonable. But he who tells the truth without compulsion merits no leniency.