We must work passionately and indefatigably to bridge the gulf between our scientific progress and our moral progress. One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.
Man’s strength resides in his capacity and desire to elevate himself, so as to attain the good. To travel step by step toward the heights. And that is all he can do. To reach heaven and remain there is beyond his powers: Even Moses had to return to earth. Is it the same for evil?
Moral progress has consisted in the main of protest against cruel customs, and of attempts to enlarge human sympathy.
For every one step that you take in the pursuit of higher knowledge, take three steps in the perfection of your own character
The march of intellect is proceeding at quick time; and if its progress be not accompanied by a corresponding improvement in morals and religion, the faster it proceeds, with the more violence will you be hurried down the road to ruin.
If experiments on animals were abandoned on grounds of compassion, mankind would have made a fundamental advance.
When wisdom reaches the acme of perfection, it will suppress the vicious instincts and injurious desires.
Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best.
There can be no progress-real, moral prgress-except in the individual and by the individual himself.
years ago we would have been burned for this. Now what I am suggesting is that we've advanced.
I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal.
There is a material advancement; we desire it. There is, also, a moral grandeur; we hold fast to it.
Humanism is a philosophy of joyous service for the greater good of all humanity, of application of new ideas of scientific progress for the benefit of all.
He that is good, will infallibly become better, and he that is bad, will as certainly become worse; for vice, virtue and time are three things that never stand still.
Perhaps we are wiser, less foolish and more far-seeing than we were two hundred years ago. But we are still imperfect in all these things, and since the turn of the century it has been remarked that neither wisdom nor virtue have increased as rapidly as the need for both.
Even if a country has money and technology, if it is retarded spiritually or morally, we cannot say it is advanced.
Liberty and morality had to win their way slowly over many centuries, until finally expanding liberty made possible the great technological advance of the Industrial Revolution and the flowering of modern capitalism.
A concern with the perfectibility of mankind is always a symptom of thwarted or perverted development.
If a man is not rising upward to be an angel, depend on it, he is sinking downward to be a devil.
You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.
Getting to a higher spiritual level is like increasing your credit score. You get a lot more points for sinning and repenting than if you have no credit history at all.
The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human.
The disastrous feature of our civilization is that it is far more developed materially than spiritually. Its balance is disturbed.
Mankind's survival is dependent on man's ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty, and war; the solution of these problems is in turn dependent upon man's squaring his moral progress with his scientific progress, and learning the practical art of living in harmony.
I believe that Western civilization, after some disgusting glitches, has become almost civilized. I believe it is our first duty to protect that civilization. I believe it is our second duty to improve it. I believe it is our third duty to extend it if we can.
