John Burdon Sanderson Haldane Quotes

Many an act that man does is right or wrong according to the time and place which form, so to speak, its context; strip it of its surrounding circumstances, and you tear away its meaning. Gentlemen reformers, beware of this common practice of yours! Beware of calling an act evil on Tuesday because that same act was evil on Monday!

Broadmindedness, when it means indifference to right and wrong, eventually ends in a hatred of what is right.

There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.

What we think is ethical today, we may not have thought ethical five or 10 years ago. Cloning, stem cell research? However we feel about those things today, we may feel differently 10 years from now.

Stand, you've been sitting much too long, there's a permanent crease in your right or wrong.

It's hard for the Catholic Church to accept change. When the mass was no longer said in Latin, loyalists went into mourning for years.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

I'm a Utilitarian, so I don't see the rule against lying as absolute; it's always subject to some overriding utility which may prevent its exercise.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

This, it may be said, is no more than a hypothesis... only of that force of precedent which in all times has been so strong to keep alive religious forms of which the original meaning is lost.

The idea of good and evil is a myth created by the politicians, the priests, and all those who have an interest to keep it at their mercy.

Look through the whole histories of countries professing the Romish religion and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action—that the end will sanction any means.

He [William Gladstone] made his conscience not his guide but his accomplice.

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.

I went to a fundamentalist Christian high school and went to a fundamentalist church, and they were the greatest people; there was an amazing sense of community. The problem is when the messiness of real life enters, and the inflexibility of a moral code cannot cope with the realities of moral relativism.

Some people don't want to be morally consistent. They just want to be tied to their one issue.

Matters change and morals change; men remain.

A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence.

Convictions are variable; to be always consistent is to be sometimes dishonest.

Our ability to adapt and therefore to accept everything is one of our greatest dangers. Creatures that are completely flexible, changeable, can have no fixed morality.

I am no one to be a purist.

What humanity abhors, custom reconciles and recommends to us.

Science, which is only another name for truth, now holds religious charlatans, self-deceivers and God agents in a certain degree of check--agents and employees, I mean, of a mythical, medieval, man-made God, anthropomorphic in constitution.

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

God keep me from the divinity of Yes and Nothe Yea Nay Creeping Jesus, from supposing Up and Down to be the same thing as allexperimentalists must suppose.