Brandon Sanderson Quotes

The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.

I don't know if winning at any cost is wrong or not. There are times I've thought that the end justified the means.

Was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood?

We should be very chary of sacrificing large numbers of people for the sake of a contingent end, however advantageous that may appear… We never know enough to make the chance worth taking.

Even things like supermarket self-checkouts, they do mean people's jobs go. It's always worth thinking about the implications of things. Just because something's easier, it doesn't mean that it's the right thing to do.

The decision to put American lives at risk is a decision that has a very high hurdle to pass.

Even for the world's only superpower, the ends don't always justify the means.

All the stats don't mean a thing if we don't get the win. The most important stat is the win. Nothing else really matters if you don't get the win.

No human endeavour can ever be wholly good... it must always have a cost.

Abortion can never be safe. Any procedure where "success" means the killing of another human being can certainly not be safe.

You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.' Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.

willing me to understand: that people should be sacrificed to causes, that beauty can be built on the backs of the dead.

I'm a very good decision maker because I have core set of principles and so I can make decisions. Decisions can be very hard and you have to wrestle with them, but I'm able to get all the data on the table and figure out what would be the best decision because decisions mean ill for some people and mean positives for others.

The third rule of ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means.

The right to do something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

Science is important, but so is ethics, so is balancing life. To destroy life to save life - it's one of the real ethical dilemmas that we face.

Those who praise victory relish manslaughter. Those who relish manslaughter cannot reach their goals in the world.

Peace, which costs nothing, is attended with infinitely more advantage than any victory with all its expence.

Short term, the most important thing is to put people back to work ... If they're working, that means they're paying taxes, that means that they're buying goods and services - and the economy, instead of being on a downward spiral, starts back up on an upward spiral.

And after a while...I mean how do you choose? Who gets to live? Part of life is that...well, some people have to die.

Most programs are not write-once. They are reworked and rewritten again and again in their lived. Bugs must be debugged. Changing requirements and the need for increased functionality mean the program itself may be modified on an ongoing basis. During this process, human beings must be able to read and understand the original code. It is therefore more important by far for humans to be able to understand the program than it is for the computer.

No one so dislikes being punished unjustly as the person who might have been punished justly on scores of previous occasions, if he had only been found out.

One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.

The most important thing... was to change their spirit; and since at that time I felt that literature was the best means to this end, I decided to promote literary movement.

The trouble with shooting people, Edie Banister now remembers, is that it's so hard to do just one.