Victor Hugo Quotes

Justice is the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society, and I don't believe there is any royal road to attain such accommodation concretely

Which is better--to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?

Is not every action of Hamlet induced by a fanatical impulse, which tells him that duty consists in revenge alone? And dose it need superhuman efforts to recognize that revenge never can be duty? I say again that Hamlet thinks much, but that he is by no means wise.

For Confucians, we are such thoroughly social beings that individual and social interests are not in the end regarded as fundamentally incompatible. Though there will be conflicts, the central mission of moral and political philosophy is to foster approaches that will render them compatible or if that is not possible in some cases, to keep a reasonable balance so that neither side is consistently sacrificed for the sake of the other.

I don't think there's anything in the compromise that means that there's a clash of ethics.

No minority should climb all over the majority.

Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.

Justice is the means by which established injustices are sanctioned.

The real guarantee of freedom is an equilibrium of social forces in conflict, not the triumph of any one force.

I'm a father, a son, and a grandson, and if anyone messed with my wife, mom, or grandmother, and if the law didn't care about it, what would I do? Would I be defined by that action?

Between being 'right' and being kind, I know which way I vote.

History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics.

The cunning man steals a horse, the wise man lets him alone.

When it becomes a bloody reality, we have to come together and look at what can be done to return to the order of peace, ... There is no alternative to it.

It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.

For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.

Justice is that system of adjusting conflicting interests which makes the group strong and progressive rather than weak and retrogressive whereas injustice is a system of adjusting conflicting interests which makes a nation weak and retrogressive rather than strong and progressive.

I see the main problem of my life, and indeed anybody's life, as the balancing of competitive freedoms ... a sense of mutual obligations that have to be honored, and a legal system which can be trusted to step in when that sense fails.

Good and evil both increase at compound interest.

It is safer to do most men harm than to do them too much good.

The question of good and evil remains in irremediable chaos for those who seek to fathom it in reality. It is mere mental sport to the disputants, who are captives that play with their chains.

An ethic that emphasizes relationship and community can be concerned with protecting the individual's interests, but always with an eye to trying to reconcile those interests with those of others. An ethic emphasizing rights and autonomy should be concerned with promoting enough community to foster a motivating concern for everyone's rights, not just one's own.

Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals.

There is not, nor should there be, an irreconcilable contrast between the individual and the collective, between the interests of an individual person and the interests of the collective.

The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.