Jane Green Quotes

I have long been fascinated by our inclination to assume others we meet have the same moral code, similar values, and yet we can never be sure.

All deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to practice, and falsehood passing from words into things.

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

When I was in high school, I had a notebook that I filled up with rules about lying. It must have been a hundred pages long - one hundred pages of rules about lying!

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that morality is not just a matter of opinion.

Modern morality is all about perception.

Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.

You can't go around hoping that most people have sterling moral characters. The most you can hope for is that people will pretend that they do.

Is there one specific source that determines correct morality and everybody should follow that? Or should individuals come up with following that source or not depending on their situation?

Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.

Me, I'm dishonest, and you can always trust a dishonest man to be dishonest. Honestly, it's the honest ones you have to watch out for.

The imperative is to define what is right and do it.

I don't want to do anything that violates my own personal code of ethics and morals.

I tend to think that good and evil exist and that the quantity in each of us is unchangeable. The moral character of people is set, fixed until death.

In a world where everyone is behaving honestly, any dishonesty constitutes a big infraction. But, in a world where many people are behaving dishonestly, and the news is filled with stories of their infractions, even big infractions can feel small to the perpetrator.

Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.

You have principles. You test them as accurately as you can. Eventually, they might break down.

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

It's okay to lie as long as you reach a higher truth doing it.

Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.

A man is not good or bad for one action.

What is right, what is wrong, how can anyone say? I view very, very, few things as Right with a capital R.

Conventionality is not morality.