Arthur Koestler Quotes

To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles.

I think in general the ends do not justify the means.

Look through the whole histories of countries professing the Romish religion and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action—that the end will sanction any means.

The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.

It is a principle that the right to a thing gives a right to the means without which it could not be used, that is to say, that the means follow their end.

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

The seventh rule of the ethics of means and ends is that generally success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics. The judgment of history leans heavily on the outcome of success or failure; it spells the difference between the traitor and the patriotic hero. There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father.

Our culture has forgotten what the Founders knew: The American experiment is a moral, not just a political, exercise.

What's distinctively shocking about Machiavelli is that he didn't care. He believed not only that politicians must do evil in the name of the public good, but also that they shouldn't worry about it. He was unconcerned, in other words, with what modern thinkers call 'the problem of dirty hands.'

I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct.

The great political questions are in their final analysis great moral questions.

If the ends don't justify the means, what does?

The very essence of political philosophy is the carving out of an ethical system - strictly, a subset of ethics dealing with political ethics. Ethics is the one rational discipline that demands the establishment of a rational set of value judgments; political ethics is that subset applying to matters of State.

Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked. Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away.

Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.

There are times when the end justifies the means. But when you build an argument based on a whole series of such times, you may find that you've constructed an entire philosophy of evil." --Luke Skywalker

A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good. Therefore, it is necessary for a prince, who wishes to maintain himself, to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not use it according to the necessity of the case.

I worry that when you start quoting Machiavelli to justify your actions, you have ceased to be one of the good guys. No, quoting Nietzsche does that. Machiavelli is just cool.

The end justifies the means only when the means used are such as actually bring about the desired and desirable end.

Most things that are politically right are morally wrong

But the Lacedaemonians, who make it their first principle of action to serve their country's interest, know not any thing to be just or unjust by any measure but that.

Immoral: Inexpedient. Whatever in the long run and with regard to the greater number of instances men find to be generally inexpedient comes to be considered wrong, wicked, immoral. If mans notions of right and wrong have any other basis than this of expediency; if they originated, or could have originated, in any other way; if actions have in themselves a moral character apart from and nowise dependent on, their consequences-then all philosophy is a lie and reason a disorder of the mind.

But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.

Morality has nothing in common with politics.

So far as he is able, a prince should stick to the path of good but, if the necessity arises, he should know how to follow evil.