Howard Rheingold Quotes

What's vice today may be virtue, tomorrow.

If enough people openly engage in conduct once considered reprehensible, we rewrite the rule book and assume that God, as a good democrat, will go along.

Value preferences of people change.

Custom ... changes the very nature of things; and what was honorable a thousand years ago, may probably be looked upon as infamous now.

A hundred years ago Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter was given an A for adultery; today she would rate no better than a C-plus.

Everything that used to be a sin is now a disease.

In passing, we should note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.

People all over the world are today questioning matters that only a few generations ago were generally seen as "just the way things are.”

What was right yesterday can't be wrong today.

I fear … that morals do not of necessity advance hand in hand with the sciences.

Celibacy used to offend family-values conservatism; now it offends equally against the opposite spirit.

In ethics, we don't make progress by discovering pre-existent truths; we do so by solving problems.

The moral code which was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for our children.

What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best.

The highest ethical duty is often to discard the outmoded ethics of the past.

For that which all men then did virtue call, Is now called vice; and that which vice was hight, Is now hight virtue, and so used of all: Right now is wrong, and wrong that was is right

What were once vices are the fashion of the day.

I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written'… It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.

People drift from generation to generation, and the morally unthinkable becomes thinkable as the years move on.

To develop and perfect and arm conscience is the great achievement of history.

I grow tired of 18th century moralities in a 20th century space-atomic age

One century's saint is the next century's heretic ... and one century's heretic is the next century's saint. It is as well to think long and calmly before affixing either name to any man.

The so-called new morality is too often the old immorality condoned.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. Now, Heaven knows, anything goes. The world has gone mad today, and good's bad today, and black's white today, and day's night today.