Robert Bruce Spencer Quotes

There are worse things than a lie... I have found... that it may be well to choose one sin in order that another may be shunned.

You may, if you are an old-fashioned schoolmaster, wish to consider yourself full of universal benevolence and at the same time derive great pleasure from caning boys. In order to reconcile these two desires you have to persuade yourself that caning

It's easier to tell a lie, than to tell the truth. It's easier to kill a fly, than it is to turn it loose.

I try to be a good cop. I try to be a good little soldier and follow orders up to a point. But in the end I’m not really a cop, or a soldier. I am a legally sanctioned murderer. I am the Executioner.

What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church ... a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them.

Sometimes you have to do what’s wrong in order to do what’s right.

To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one s own conscience is to abandon mankind.

The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.

Everyone makes moral choices that better themselves and hurt someone else along the way - and whether or not the means justify the ends. And that, to me, is universal.

If Christ would have left Christian ethics codified on the table, then he wouldn't produce moral beings choosing between good and evil, but conformists fulfilling orders. I think the same can be said about the Bible.

It was a lie but he believed in telling lies to people. Truth telling and medicine just didn't go together except in dire emergencies, if then.

Where two motives, neither of them perfectly justifiable, may be assigned, the worst has the chance of being preferred.

People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon.

Of course I want to be good, but that may not be to your advantage.

How long had he been doing what was necessary instead of what was right? In a fair world they would be one and the same.

The most reckless sinner against his own conscience has always in the background the consolation that he will go on in this course only this time, or only so long, but that at such a time he will amend. We may be assured that we do not stand clear with our own consciences so long as we determine or project, or even hold it possible, at some future time to alter our course of action.

I think ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense.

As Angelo discovered in Measure for Measure, nothing corrupts like virtue.

Nobody has the right to put another under such a difficulty that he must either hurt the person by telling the truth or hurt himself by telling what is not true.

If it were absolutely necessary to choose, I would rather be guilty of an immoral act than of a cruel one.

When you have established that one alternative is good and the other is evil, there is no justification for the choice of a mixture. There is no justification ever for choosing any part of what you know to be evil.

One must lie under certain circumstances and at all times when one can't do anything about them.

For me, as a Christian I will be uncomfortable because in all my teachings and all my learning, biblically, it's not right.

I have always derived indescribable pleasure from leading a decent woman to the edge of sin and leaving her there to live between the temptation and the fear of that sin.