Jeane Kirkpatrick Quotes

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

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct.

Even at school I studied ethics instead of religion.

Ethics are pre-determined and a matter of discovery, not a evolved concept.

If you say morality is just what you like, you lose the metaphysical level of what in the history of philosophy is called 'categorical imperative.'

You might want to think twice before you try to use a man's conscience against him. It may turn out he doesn't have one.

There are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition. There are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it.

All morality depends upon our sentiments; and when any action or quality of the mind pleases us after a certain manner we say it is virtuous; and when the neglect or nonperformance of it displeases us after a like manner, we say that we lie under an obligation to perform it.

The principles of ethics come from our own nature as social, reasoning beings.

Morality, a muzzle for the will; logic, a climbing iron for the mind.

Ethics is a code of values which guide our choices and actions and determine the purpose and course of our lives.

The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.

Moral Teleology supplies the deficiency in physical Teleology , and first establishes a Theology ; because the latter, if it did not borrow from the former without being observed, but were to proceed consistently, could only found a Demonology , which is incapable of any definite concept.

Morality must guide calculation, and calculation must guide politics.

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

Ethics is inescapable.

The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others.

Morality binds and blinds.

Ethics, as has been well said, are the finest fruits of humanity, but they are not its roots

Legality alone is no guide for a moral people. There are many things in this world that have been, or are, legal but clearly immoral. Slavery was legal. Did that make it moral? South Africa’s apartheid, Nazi persecution of Jews, and Stalinist and Maoist purges were all legal, but did that make them moral?

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions.

I doubt not, but from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out.