Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes

If you're going to figure something out, study ethics. You can ask What's the answer? What's Right and Wrong? What I learned is that nobody knows the answer and there is no Right and Wrong. So I'm incapable of becoming a fundamentalist because there are no absolutes, there's always a what if.

Moral principle is a looser bond than pecuniary interest.

For a good cause, wrongdoing is virtuous.

That which is selfish is immoral, and that which is unselfish is moral.

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 worry that when you start quoting Machiavelli to justify your actions, you have ceased to be one of the good guys. No, quoting Nietzsche does that. Machiavelli is just cool.

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

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

Selfishness is the bedrock on which all moral behavior starts and it can be immoral only when it conflicts with a higher moral imperative.

Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest.

There being no absolute and universal standard of right, terrorism must be held to be wrong in every case.

There's no such thing as altruism.

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

I believe it is universally understood and acknowledged that all men will ever act correctly, unless they have a motive to do otherwise.

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.

I don't subscribe to any particular doctrine or ideology. I just think that there's kind of a good and bad, the good being life in its purest, happiest form, and the other being the darker side of existence.

The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest.

People always choose self-preservation over the greater good, most of the time, with the belief that self-preservation is the greater good.

I don't believe in good people and bad people.

It's better to die doing good than to live doing evil.

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.

moral, adj. Conforming to a local and mutable standard of right. Having the quality of general expediency.

The order of nature [is] that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue.

It is impossible to be just if one is not generous.

Right and wrong are not the product of census.