Edgar Lee Masters Quotes

To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals.

The morality of compromise' sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don't compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised. I shall argue that strong men, conversely, know when to compromise and that all principles can be compromised to serve a greater principle.

It all comes down to money. If the money is right, I'll fight anybody, any time. I'll hit my grandma in the face if the price is right.

There is no more subtle dissolvent of morals than sentimentality.

Without God and religion you don't have moral truth, you have moral opinion

Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.

You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.

Moral maxims are surprisingly useful on occasions when we can invent little else to justify our actions.

The short story, free from the longuers of the novel is also exempt from the novel's conclusiveness--too often forced and false: it may thus more nearly than the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth.

Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.

Though of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is something.

You corrupt religion either in favour of your friends, or against your enemies.

Moral principles do not depend on a majority vote. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong. Right is right, even if nobody is right.

At the centre of every fairy tale lay a truth that gave the story its power

I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

I think...that I would rather recollect a life mis-spent on fragile things than spent avoiding moral debt.

A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.

It (Lewinskygate) has...compromised his moral authority

A legal broom's a moral chimney-sweeper, And that's the reason he himself's so dirty

It is disgusting to pick your teeth; what is vulgar is to use a gold toothpick.

Writers are the moral purifiers of the culture. We may not be pure ourselves but we must tell the truth, which is a purifying act.

My moral standing is lying down.

What humanity abhors, custom reconciles and recommends to us.

I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.

Once a person becomes a government dependent, his moral standing to resist the expansion of government power is fatally compromised.