Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

Honor to a Spaniard, no matter how dishonest, is as real a thing as water, wine, or olive oil. There is honor among pickpockets and honor among whores. It is simply that the standards differ.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

Morality is the thing upon which your friends smile, and immorality is the thing upon which they frown

What goes on in the world and who's defining what is right or wrong in anything? Is there a place in any of our existence where we need judgment any longer? But we should have empathy towards each other and break away from those categories that politics and religion keep throwing back at us.

Modern morality is all about perception.

You can't legislate morality.

The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.

Conventionality is not morality.

It ain't no sin if you crack a few laws now and then, just so long as you don't break any.

Because of the diverse conditions of humans, it happens that some acts are virtuous to some individuals … while the same acts are immoral for others …

Morality is a social necessity

There is no maxim ... which is more liable to be misapplied ... than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong.

It's very much simpler to get rid of any written rule you choose than it is an item of customary morality... while laws are preserved on tablets of wood or stone, customary morality is engraved deep in our living souls

History requires us to judge the figures of the past not by our moral standards but by those of the ages in which they lived and worked.

A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right and evil doesn't become good, just because it's accepted by a majority.

Moral principles have lost their distinctiveness. For modern man, absolute right and absolute wrong are a matter of what the majority is doing.

Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson.

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

Well, I believe in the idea of 'normal' in the way that I believe in the idea of logic. Or the idea of character. All of these ethical constructs are just that: constructs.

Good and bad are really arbitrary words when it comes to character.

What's vice today may be virtue, tomorrow.

Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics.