Richard Stallman Quotes

We respect law, when the law respects our needs. Whenever legality clashes with morality, legality should be opposed and morality should be upheld.

Ethical inquiry has always been motivated by the aim of improving human conduct. It doesn't follow from that that the goal is to produce a complete rule book that would be applicable to all cases.

Justice is the idea of God, the ideal of man, the rule of conduct writ in the nature of mankind.

Ordinary human laws are the means - however imperfect - by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.

If you're going to figure something out, study ethics. You can ask What's the answer? What's Right and Wrong? What I learned is that nobody knows the answer and there is no Right and Wrong. So I'm incapable of becoming a fundamentalist because there are no absolutes, there's always a what if.

We must never lose sight of the fact that the law has a moral foundation, and we must never fail to ask ourselves not only what the law is, but what the law should be.

It is true that legality is not morality, and sticking to the law is necessary for good citizenship, but it is not sufficient.

The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.

In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics.

Although the legal and ethical definitions of right are the antithesis of each other, most writers use them as synonyms. They confuse power with goodness, and mistake law for justice

Politicians may do as they please, so long as they violate no rule of right, no principle of justice, no law of God; but in no world, in no order, or condition, have men the right to do wrong.

What is right is not derived from the rule, but the rule arises from our knowledge of what is right

That which is not just, is not Law; and that which is not Law, ought not to be obeyed.

Law is not law, if it violates the principles of eternal justice.

The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization.

Morality is always derivative. It stems from one's worldview.

The order of nature [is] that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue.

Morality is the thing upon which your friends smile, and immorality is the thing upon which they frown

A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.

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.

Questions of natural right are triable by their conformity with the moral sense and reason of man.

Morality is truth in full bloom.

Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour, but then centuries to try it in, they are found to be identical.

You can't slice up morals.

In logic, there are no morals.