Errico Malatesta Quotes

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

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.

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

I think evil is very relative.

Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.

Modern morality is all about perception.

It cannot be precisely known how any thing is good or bad, till it is precisely known what it is.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

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

The intuition of free will gives us the truth.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty.

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 follow my conscience - and this is upsetting to some people, but I maintain the conscience is going to be the only thing between us and communication in the future.

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.

I want people to come away from my book with questions. Questions about virtue and goodness. Not answers.

The individual makes a clear effort to define moral values and principles that have validity and application apart from the authority of the groups of persons holding them and apart from the individual's own identification with the group.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don't know it.

Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds - and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

As long as I'm not hurting anybody, I don't think that anything I do is wrong.

There is only one thing about which I am certain, and that is that there is very little about which one can be certain.

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.