William James Quotes

I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win.

Good and evil exist only in terms of the happiness or suffering they create in ourselves and others

If it's anything that's going to result in suffering to animals or people, then I don't think [the end] justifies the means... Yeah; but then again if you could hurt ten people to save 100 people and there was no option, what would you do? I can't really address that.

No one has a right to happiness.

I personally would go further and say that, if your morality is based, as mine is, on a desire to increase the sum of happiness and reduce suffering, the decision to deliberately give birth to a Down baby, when you have the choice to abort it early in the pregnancy, might actually be immoral from the point of view of the child’s own welfare.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

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.

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.

If my survival caused another to perish, then death would be sweeter and more beloved.

Sometimes the right thing gets done for the wrong reason and sometimes, unfortunately, the wrong thing gets done for the right reason.

One of the key issues will be personal honour vs. the good of the many, and unforeseen consequences.

If the end does not justify the means, what does?

Who wills the ends must not shrink from the means.

The end must justify the means.

War not only teaches what man can be, but it teaches also what he must not be.

Truth stood on one side and Ease on the other; it has often been so.

This life is a test, and we're put down here to make choices. The truth is, the bad choices of other people can hurt us.

If the ends don't justify the means, what does?

I loved 'Casablanca.' You know, right vs. wrong. I think I like a movie where there is a victory, right over wrong, but there's always some price to be paid.

I killed one man to save 100,000.

Sin can bring pleasure, but never happiness.

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.

The attempt to remove evil from the world by killing a thousand evil - doers, only adds to the evil in the world.

We want to be saved from our misery, but not from our sin. We want to sin without misery, just as the prodigal son wanted inheritance without the father. The foremost spiritual law of the physical universe is that this hope can never be realized. Sin always accompanies misery. There is no victimless crime, and all creation is subject to decay because of humanity’s rebellion from God.

It was better that a little blood should be shed that much blood should be saved. The blood that was shed was bad blood; the blood that was saved was good blood.