Lynn Coady Quotes

The most pressing ethical question is to make sure that everything you do from a scientific standpoint is done for the ultimate good and positive issue for the people that you're caring about.

People will justify whatever for a good cause.

You look at the part in '12 Years A Slave,' you finish that script - I mean, it's a powerful story. You go, 'Man, I have to play a bad character in this.' And then you go, 'Well, do I want to play a bad character and contribute to a good story?'

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

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm tossed human vessel.

Those who tell the stories rule society.

Never underestimate the power of a good story.

Some dreamers demand that scientists only discover things that can be used for good. That is impossible. Science gives us a powerful vocabulary, and it is impossible to produce a vocabulary with which one can only say nice things.

It's because I work in ethics, and, more specifically, applied ethics, that I think it's important that if you have things to say that you think are right and you think could make the world a better place, it's important that many people read about them.

We don't have some message from God that gives us a list of what's good and what's not good. Obviously, we have to make our own flawed judgments about each thing.

Some things must be good in themselves, else there could be no measure whereby to lay out good and evil.

I think that fiction is an excellent place for us to struggle with questions of good and evil, and humanity and inhumanity.

Children and teens take in stories to the deepest imaginable level. What we put on the page can change the people they'll become and the course of their lives.

We Christians should be aware that there's something at stake in cultural participation that we wouldn't have been concerned about if all we did was worry about the messages in culture.

I don't think anyone sets out to do something bad, it's just that it's very difficult.

I don't believe in good human beings, but I believe you can have structures that make it easier to make the right choice or the wrong choice.

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be either good or evil.

We are now facing a problem more of ethics than of physics.

Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.

Conscience is known to be adequate in individuals; in large numbers little is to be expected of it.

modern civilization and the progress of science have greatly improved man's life and have brought comfort and ease in their trail. But civilization can serve man both for good as well as for evil purposes. Experience shows that it has invariably brought great dividends to those who use it for good purposes while it has always brought incalculable harm and damnation to those who use it for evil purposes

The ends do not justify the means. The means are the ends.

One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue ... Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.

If a story is telling a truth, then why shouldn't it affect everybody?