Edgar Z. Friedenberg Quotes

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm tossed human vessel.

There's no question that as science, knowledge and technology advance, that we will attempt to do more significant things. And there's no question that we will always have to temper those things with ethics.

The respect for human rights, essential if we are to use technology wisely, is not something alien that must be grafted onto science. On the contrary, it is integral to science, as also to scholarship in general.

The extent to which ethics leads or lags the scientific juggernaut will now be measured in the specific policy decisions our democratic political systems produce.

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

What man's mind can create, man's character can control.

All attempts to adapt our ethical code to our situation in the technological age have failed.

It is not clear to anyone, least of all the practitioners, how science and technology in their headlong course do or should influence ethics and law, education and government, art and social philosophy, religion and the life of the affections. Yet science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.

Science, engineering, and technology discovers and invents new ways of doing things - but it doesn't dictate how we should do them.

Every right is married to a duty; every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility; and there cannot be genuine freedom unless there exists also genuine order, in the moral realm and in the social realm.

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

Conscience, man's moral medicine chest.

Conscience, that boon companion who sets a man free under the strong breastplate of innocence, that bids him on and fear not.

If you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation to do something about it.

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? But the man who orders his life according to their teachings cannot go far wrong.

The problem for me with liberals is that we've abdicated our moral responsibility to the universe.

The Moral Sense teaches us what is right, and how to avoid it-when unpopular.

The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being - which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs - where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.

In order to be true to one's conscience and true to God, a righteous man has no alternative but to refuse to cooperate with an evil system.

Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.

The search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority.

These days - with the decline of the traditional churches - I'm concerned about where we obtain some form of moral direction.

If we try to define our own moral universe, there's a price for that.

Faith in order, which is the basis of science, cannot reasonably be separated from faith in an Ordainer, which is the basis of religion.

It is obvious that while science is struggling to bring Heaven to earth some men are using its materials in the construction of Hell.