Florence Nightingale Quotes

Morality is seldom a safe guide for human conduct.

Morality's not practical. Morality's a gesture. A complicated gesture learnt from books.

Morality and ethics are nothing but footballs, wherewith people, strong people play to win points.

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.

I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn't. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one's aims are, that's the trouble, specially if you're British.

I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

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

The content of scientific theory itself offers no moral foundation for the personal conduct of life.

...virtue is not merely a state in conformity with the right principle, but one that implies the right principle; and the right principle in moral conduct is prudence.

The world is not that black and white, Rachel. There are no moral absolutes. It is complex.

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.

Unpredictability means what it means. I don't know how you define it. It is what it is.

I love the gray area between right and wrong.

There is something special about the beauty in the unclear, the ambiguity, the in-between that you can't totally recognise.

Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it.

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.

Man can sin against nature in two ways. First, when he sins against his specific rational nature, acting contrary to reason. In this sense, we can say that every sin is a sin against man's nature, because it is against man's right reason.

For a good cause, wrongdoing is virtuous.

An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.

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

In ethics, prudence is not an important virtue, but in the world it is almost everything.

I learned then that practically no one in the world is entirely bad or entirely good, and that motives are often more important than actions.

We can assume that most people, most of the time, are moral creatures. But imagine that this morality is like a gearshift that at times gets pushed into neutral. When that happens, morality is disengaged. If the car happens to be on an incline, car and driver move precipitously downhill. It is then the nature of the circumstances that determines outcomes, not the driver's skills or intentions.

Every act of every man is a moral act, to be tested by moral, and not by economic criteria.

But now I wonder--what if everyone is pretty much the same and it's just a thousand small choices that add up to the person you are? No good or evil, no black and white, no inner demons or angels whispering the right answers in our ears like it's some cosmic SAT test. Just us, hour by hour, minute by minute, day by day,making the best choices we can. The thought is horrifying. If that's true, then there's no right choice. There's only choice.