Gary L. Francione Quotes

An education which does not teach us to discriminate between good and bad, to assimilate the one and eschew the other, is a misnomer

Education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world.

The issues of the choice between right and wrong has to be an ongoing concern for everybody, at every age. There is no magical point in a human life when anyone is or becomes immune to the second-by-second choice to do right instead of wrong.

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

Students should learn about the long-standing values of truth, beauty, and goodness, think hard about them, and interrogate them skillfully.

I think that the greatest education in the world is the education which helps one to be able to do the right things at the time it has to be done.

The moral faculties are generally esteemed, and with justice, as of higher value than the intellectual powers. But we should always bear in mind that the activity of the mind in vividly recalling past impressions is one of the fundamental though secondary bases of conscience. This fact affords the strongest argument for educating and stimulating in all possible ways the intellectual faculties of every human being.

Education is not complete unless we teach our children not only how to read and write but the difference between right and wrong.

There is a danger when we give young people only a catalog of dos and don'ts. In these young minds, the gospel is not intellectually credible.

"Teachers"... treat students neither coercively nor instrumentally but as joint seekers of truth and of mutual actualization. They help students define moral values not by imposing their own moralities on them but by positing situations that pose hard moral choices and then encouraging conflict and debate. They seek to help students rise to higher stages of moral reasoning and hence to higher levels of principled judgment.

We need to provide an education which teaches crit­ical thinking and encourages the development of mature moral values.

There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.

At around nine or 10 years of age, young people start to decide for themselves what's moral or not, and that's why I like writing for that age group so much.

The formation of character in young people is educationally a different task from and a prior task to, the discussion of the great, difficult ethical controversies of the day.

Those ethical choices often are made every day at a time, minute by minute in ways that you may not even relate to ethics, so I'm going to walk them through the whole story from that perspective and hopefully they'll be able to walk away with something good from it.

The thing I would most like to see invented is a way of teaching children and grown-ups the difference between right and wrong.

There's a great deal of difference between thinking reflectively about moral issues and achieving higher standards of ethical behavior.

Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.

My early research - I'm a social psychologist, and my early research was on how people make moral judgments. When I entered the field in 1987, everybody was looking at moral reasoning - how do kids reason about a moral dilemma? Should a guy steal a drug to save his wife's life?

Education is the art of making man ethical.

More important than your obligation to follow your conscience, or at least prior to it, is your obligation to form your conscience correctly.

The main experiential determinants of moral development seem to be amount and variety of social experience, the opportunity to take a number of roles and to encounter other perspectives.

The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That's how most people thought.

You always have a choice. It's just that some people make the wrong one.

There are two methods of human activity - and according to which one of these two kinds of activity people mainly follow, are there two kinds of people: One use their reason to learn what is good and what is bad and they act according to this knowledge; the other act as they want to and then they use their reason to prove that that which they did was good and that which they didn't do was bad.