Simone Weil Quotes

In cases of doubtful morality, it is usual to say is there any harm in doing this? This question may sometimes be best answered by asking ourselves another; is there any harm in letting it alone?

Should I be the one to play God? We're both about the same age, but we grew up in different neighborhoods.

Is there anybody here who thinks that following the orders takes away the blame Is there anybody here who wouldn't mind a murder by another name?

I'll do what I can to promote the greater good. If you can harm one person to save 1,000, I'm gonna do it every f**king time.

There are worse things than a lie... I have found... that it may be well to choose one sin in order that another may be shunned.

As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of good and evil?

The moral man is as guilty as the rest. His morality cannot save him.

The plea of necessity, that eternal argument of all conspirators.

Men who have lost their conviction of what is good and what is bad find themselves without a sextant to check their position by. We are in the position of a man with an elaborate camping kit who finds himself lost in the woods without his matches; to kindle a fire he has to resort to the stratagems of the caveman. We fall back through generations into the oldest terrors and confusions of the race.

It's a moral question.

Do you suppose that sacrifice is the hallmark of moral action?--Just stop to consider whether sacrifice is not involved in every action that is done with deliberation, the worst as well as the best.

Evil, as evil, can never be chosen; and though evil is often the effect of our own choice, yet we never desire it but under the appearance of an imaginary good.

Where evil may be done, it is right to ponder; where only suffered, know the shortest pause is much too long.

The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.

Moral sensibilities are nowadays at such cross-purposes that to one man a morality is proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it.

We're capable of understanding that someone has to drop an atomic bomb on a town of innocent civilians, but not that others have to cut up prostitutes who spread disease and moral depravity in the slums of London. Hence we call the former realism and the latter madness.

I can't tell the difference between wrong and right, are you laughing at me?

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

When a plane crashes and some die while others live, a skeptic calls into question God's moral character, saying that he has chosen some to live and others to die on a whim; yet you say it is your moral right to choose whether the child within you should live or die. Does that not sound odd to you? When God decides who should live or die, he is immoral. When you decide who should live or die, it's your moral right.

How can you do the right thing when you can't figure out what that is? When all you have before you are choices in various shades of wrong?

I would rather be right and die than be wrong and kill.

When you always know what is right, where is freedom? No one chooses the wrong, Jacen Solo. Uncertainty sets you free." -Vergere

Necessity may render a doubtful act innocent, but it cannot make it praiseworthy

I read these words which are the sum of all moral philosophy, and which cut short all the disputes of the casuists: When in doubt if an action is good or bad, refrain.