Laurell K. Hamilton Quotes

For a good cause, wrongdoing is virtuous.

If one must do a wrong, it's best to do it pursuing power-otherwise, let's have virtue.

Ethics is inescapable.

And don't tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn't. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That's what we live with.

One of them is knowing the difference between Morality and Wisdom. Morality is temporary, Wisdom is permanent… Ho ho. Take that one to bed with you tonight.

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

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

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?

I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.' Rose didn't answer; the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil.

The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.

Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature

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.

What is the real relation between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few generations that men have found courage to say that there is none.

I can only say that, while my own opinions as to ethics do not satisfy me, other people's satisfy me still less.

Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think...of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the 'right' notes and the 'wrong' ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.

It is better to will the good than to know the truth.

Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.

Morality is the Science of harmonious relations between intelligent beings.

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.

Dissent is morally neutral. You can correctly call yourself a dissident because you like to kick puppies, but at the end of the day, you're just a jerk who likes to kick puppies.

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

Moralism doesn't produce morality; it produces immorality.

But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.

Morality must be the heart of our existence, if it is to be what it wants to be for us. The highest form of philosophy is ethics. Thus all philosophy begins with "I am." The highest statement of cognition must be an expression of that fact which is the means and ground for all cognition, namely, the goal of the I.

Philosophy is fundamentally about how you come to terms with living your life and trying to do it in a wise manner, and, for me, that means decently and compassionately and courageously and so forth.