Lord Salisbury Quotes

There is no right in acting.

Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong.

The ends do not justify the means. The means are the ends.

Any tool can be used for good or bad. It's really the ethics of the artist using it.

It is a sin not to do what one is capable of doing.

To what extent is any given man morally responsible for any given act? We do not know.

Every judgement of conscience, be it right or wrong, be it about things evil in themselves or morally indifferent, is obligatory, in such wise that he who acts against his conscience always sins.

It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.

We are all responsible for our actions and our failures to act.

If the end does not justify the means, what does?

...guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.

Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world - and there clearly are - then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

I think evil is very relative.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

I think the greater responsibility, in terms of morality, is where leadership begins.

All moral laws are merely statements that certain kinds of actions will have good effects.

You will be judged in years to come by how you responded to genocide on your watch.

There is no truth without responsibility following in its wake.

Someone once asked, 'What is the difference between me and Saddam Hussein?' The answer is, 'I have a conscience and he doesn't.'

My feeling is that the hero has now been defined by phrases like the odious one that we were all raised with - crimes does not pay. Of course it pays, you schmuck. That's not why we don't do it. We don't do it because it is wrong.

I do not hold with those who think it is all right to do whatever you want so long as it doesn't hurt anyone. Who's to be the judge of that?

Only when the voice of duty is silent, or when it has already spoken, may we allowably think of the consequences of a particular action.

If you didn't have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn't be morality but with consciousness that you have it.

There is nothing politically right that is morally wrong.