Antonio Tabucchi Quotes

But let us emphasize that right and wrong, righteousness and sin, are not dependent upon man's interpretations, conventions and attitudes. Social acceptance does not change the status of an act, making wrong into right. If all the people in the world were to accept homosexuality, the practice would still be a deep, dark sin.

The notion that there is no basic value system is far more incoherent or invalid than the notion that there are essential values. Every religion can tell you it has basic values. You ask a Christian, most Christians would say love God and love your neighbor. Is that the entirety of Christianity? No one in his right mind would say it is.

While public opinion might sway back and forth, right and wrong do not.

Moral principles do not depend on a majority vote. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong. Right is right, even if nobody is right.

The absolute good is not a matter of opinion but of nature.

Some people want tolerance to mean now that all ideas are equally valid. That's nonsense. There are some things that are right and there are some things that are wrong.

All the great things of humanity have been accomplished in the name of absolute principles.

Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?

Once you depart from the Ten Commandments as being the foundation of right and wrong, you are in a free fall.

Some things must be good in themselves, else there could be no measure whereby to lay out good and evil.

Truth is not half way between right and wrong;

We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.

If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Nazism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities.

There need to be some absolutes in life.

Without God and religion you don't have moral truth, you have moral opinion

Right and wrong as moral principles do not change. They are applicable and reliable determinants whether the situations with which we deal are simple or complicated. There is always a right and wrong to every question which requires our solution.

Freedom that ignores the transcendent difference between good and evil ends in the denial of freedom itself.

There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.

The four absolutes we all have in our minds: love, justice, evil, and forgiveness.

You cannot have a boundary-less existence, because your neighbor has his own boundaries, and who is going to give you the ethics between the two boundaries? If there is no objective moral law, relativism will take hold, and relativism ultimately will lead to self-destruction.

Right is right though all condemn, and wrong is wrong though all approve.

Absolute morality is the regulation of conduct in such a way that pain shall not be inflicted.

The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one's peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad.

You cannot build your life with a consistent worldview that is on the shifting sands of moral relativism.

Truth and right are above utility in all realms of thought and action.