Phillip E. Johnson Quotes

Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

What is considered sinful in one of the great religions to which citizens belong isn't necessarily sinful in the others. Criminal law therefore cannot be based on the notion of sin …

There is a saying in India that the person who should throw a stone first is the person who has not committed any sins. In the world right now, a lot of people want to give advice. But look within them, and they too have sinned in some way. Ultimately, India's view point is that efforts need to be made to sit together and talk, and to resolve problems in an ongoing process.

I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.

What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way, nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.

T is the will that makes the action good or ill.

Faith teaches that there is a right and wrong beyond mere opinion or desire. Most importantly, it teaches us that freedom is not an end in itself, that how freedom is exercised matters as much as freedom itself

Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense.

The advantage of being able to identify sin is that you can go out and do it, and enjoy it.

Experience has taught us that men will not adopt and carry into execution measures the best calculated for their own good without the intervention of a coercive power.

Strength and success; they are above morality, above criticism. It seems then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it.

Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.

The good, we do it; the evil, that is fortune; man is always right, and destiny always wrong.

She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.

Void of freedom, what would virtue be?

What is the freedom of the most free? To do what is right!

The essence of good and evil is a certain disposition of the will.

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

The morality of customs,the spirit of the laws, produces the man emancipated from the law.

It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss of the object , than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist.

I am prepared to maintain that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilization made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even, violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good.

Morality, taken as apart from religion, is but another name for decency of sin.

A man is free in proportion to the measure of his virtues, and the extent to which he is free determines what his virtues can accomplish.

You choose sin. You practice sin.