Benjamin Whichcote Quotes

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that morality is not just a matter of opinion.

Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

The fundamental basis of ethics must be chosen in some non-scientific way.

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.

I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.

I try not to do anything that's immoral.

No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.

Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.

I don't believe so much in good and evil.

There are no moral victories.

One needs to know what is right and what is wrong.

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

Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world - and there clearly are - then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics.

All moral laws are merely statements that certain kinds of actions will have good effects.

Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.

The imperative is to define what is right and do it.

If you didn't have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn't be morality but with consciousness that you have it.

There is no system that is inherently moral if the participants themselves are not.

At times, morality can be dismissed as a matter of personal conscience, no matter how widespread its acceptance. Ethics, on the other hand, arises from societal or group commitments to principia of behavior.

It may not have the virtuous ring of the golden rule, but the maxim 'never say never' is one of the most important in ethics.

Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.

The values by which we are to survive are not rules for just and unjust conduct, but are those deeper illuminations in whose light justice and injustice, good and evil, means and ends are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.

I'll never go against my morals.