Richard Stallman Quotes

I always end up taking people that are morally ambiguous.

Moral certainty is never more than probability.

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.

If the Soviet Government orders me to act against my conscience, I do not obey …. Conscience is above the law. No law which is against the conscience can bind.

I think evil is very relative.

Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

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

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

I follow my conscience - and this is upsetting to some people, but I maintain the conscience is going to be the only thing between us and communication in the future.

I want people to come away from my book with questions. Questions about virtue and goodness. Not answers.

There is but one right, and the possibilities of wrong are infinite.

Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.

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.

Conscience without judgment is superstition.

The fundamental basis of ethics must be chosen in some non-scientific way.

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 …

Without a clear moral vision, we devolve into moral relativism, and from there, into oblivion.

If you say morality is just what you like, you lose the metaphysical level of what in the history of philosophy is called 'categorical imperative.'

What most men call their conscience is imaginary virtue switching left or right according to self-interest.

I can only say that, while my own opinions as to ethics do not satisfy me, other people's satisfy me still less.

I'm not saying you did the wrong thing. I'm not even saying it wasn't something I'd thought of doing, myself. But even if it was the just thing to do, or the fitting thing, it still wasn't the right thing.

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

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

I've learned a lot about good and evil. They are not always what they appear to be.