Neal Stephenson Quotes

Moralism doesn't produce morality; it produces immorality.

Morality is truth in full bloom.

We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take a great moral ideal and achieve it merely by law.

Do people get moral when they don't get ahead?

I think that moral philosophy is useful for framing questions, but terrible at answering them. I think moral psychology is booming right now, and we're making a lot of progress on understanding how we actually work, what our moral nature is.

If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.

I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson.

I have yet to meet a man as fond of high moral conduct as he is of outward appearances.

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

You can't slice up morals.

It's my opinion that every one I know has morals, though I wouldn't like to ask. I know I have. But I'd rather teach them than practice them any day. "Give them to others"-that's my motto.

If one is not virtuous he becomes vicious.

Though of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is something.

A man may be very sincere in good principles, without having good practice.

To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.

My moral standing is lying down.

Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.

Man is not equally moral at all hours, this is well known. If his morality is judged to be the capability for great self-sacrificing resolutions and self-denial (which, when continuous and grown habitual, are called holiness)

Whenever one refuses to admit such a self-evident truth, for instance, as that it is wrong to steal, don't argue with him-search him; the reason may be found in his pocket.

After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?

Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.

What is morality, she asked. Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price.

Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience.