Cesare Beccaria Quotes

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

There were certain questions about the foundations of morals that advances in science all threaten to make more complicated.

I think evil is very relative.

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

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.

Whether gods exist or not, there is no way to get absolute certainty about ethics. Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can.

We don't have some message from God that gives us a list of what's good and what's not good. Obviously, we have to make our own flawed judgments about each thing.

We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.

There are the good and bad and every morrally ambiguous shade in between.

There are no moral victories.

I do like crossing moral boundaries.

We live in a world where everyone thinks they do the right thing, so they are entitled to do the wrong thing. So ends can justify the means.

The difference is too nice - Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

Modern morality is all about perception.

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.

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

I don't think good and evil are polarized.

I do not believe in the concept of good and evil in my personal life, in the real world. I just don't believe it. I never try to judge.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

I have an interest in understanding evil. Who is the bad guy - the vampire who kills people and sucks their blood, or the survivalists who kill people to save their own lives? Is evil merely a creation of people? Or is there an evil nature? Or is it in the eye of the beholder? I really like these questions.

I always end up taking people that are morally ambiguous.

My idea of what's good and bad and right and wrong is maybe greyer than most, and I like writing about that.

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

I think that unless you can take judgments of right and wrong like an automaton, you must have emotions because that is our only way of moral guidance.

Some things must be good in themselves, else there could be no measure whereby to lay out good and evil.