Samuel Johnson Quotes

The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.

An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.

In ethics, prudence is not an important virtue, but in the world it is almost everything.

I worry that when you start quoting Machiavelli to justify your actions, you have ceased to be one of the good guys. No, quoting Nietzsche does that. Machiavelli is just cool.

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.

Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature

It is better to will the good than to know the truth.

Morality is the Science of harmonious relations between intelligent beings.

Dissent is morally neutral. You can correctly call yourself a dissident because you like to kick puppies, but at the end of the day, you're just a jerk who likes to kick puppies.

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

As to ethics, unfortunately, we are still at sea. We never did have any popular base for what little ethics we knew, except the religious theories, and now that our faith is shaken in those theories we cannot account for ethics at all. It is no wonder we behave badly, we are literally ignorant of the laws of ethics, which is the simplest of sciences, the most necessary, the most continuously needed. The childish misconduct of our 'revolted youth' is quite equaled by that of older people, and neither young nor old seem to have any understanding of the reasons why conduct is 'good' or 'bad.

The content of scientific theory itself offers no moral foundation for the personal conduct of life.

Ethics is inescapable.

The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others.

Ethics, as has been well said, are the finest fruits of humanity, but they are not its roots

I do not believe that a man should be restrained in his daily actions by being afraid of punishment after death or that he should do things only because in this way he will be rewarded after he dies. This does not make sense. The proper guidance during the life of a man should be the weight that he puts upon ethics and the amount of consideration that he has for others.

...virtue is not merely a state in conformity with the right principle, but one that implies the right principle; and the right principle in moral conduct is prudence.

Science, by itself cannot, supply us with an ethic.

Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience.

The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.

He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this.

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

It's better to die doing good than to live doing evil.

Man can sin against nature in two ways. First, when he sins against his specific rational nature, acting contrary to reason. In this sense, we can say that every sin is a sin against man's nature, because it is against man's right reason.