Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes

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.

Morality must guide calculation, and calculation must guide politics.

Those people who treat politics and morality separately will never understand either of them.

Morality has nothing in common with politics.

The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I think it's a good rule for politics, too.

Some States just have a good political culture. It’s not all greed driven.

To inject morality into politics, is, I have said, and I repeat, the watchword of all our efforts.

Economic problems have no sharp edges. They shade off imperceptibly into politics, sociology, and ethics. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ultimate answer to every economic problem lies in some other field.

You can't adopt politics as a profession and remain honest.

Praxeology - economics - provides no ultimate ethical judgments: it simply furnishes the indispensable data necessary to make such judgments.

Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.

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

The good lawgiver should inquire how states and races of men and communities may participate in a good life, and in the happiness which is attainable by them.

When your mission is to restore honor and integrity to the White House, you've got to be willing to use any means necessary.

Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all divines and moral philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle it will follow that the form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or, in one word, happiness, to the greatest numbers of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best. All sober inquirers after truth, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue.

Politics is about ethics and morality, openly or not openly.

Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.

It's time to restore honor and dignity to the White House.

Donald Trump believes in a right and a wrong.

It may be argued that peoples for whom philosophers legislate are always prosperous.

Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion!

Progressives should recognize common morality with religion.

"Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.

Utility is the emotion pleading to be let into the house of pure reason and thereby enriching it.