Ethical metaphysics is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised, to give legislative force to our own wishes.
Only on the assumption of belief in the validity of values is the attempt to espouse value-judgments meaningful. However, to judge the validity of such values is a matter of faith .
A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.
Skepticism means, not intellectual doubt alone, but moral doubt.
Americans have become conditioned to believe the world is a gray place without absolutes; this is because we're simultaneously both cowardly and arrogant. We don't know the answers, so we assume they must not exist.
Where there is no religion, hypocrisy becomes good taste.
This demand follows from an insight that I was the first to articulate: that there are no moral facts.
There are no "standards of Right". Ethics is balderdash. Each Star must go on its own orbit. To hell with "moral principle"; there is no such thing.
Be not too hasty to trust or to admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels, but they live like men.
According to this way of arguing, there will be no true principles in the world; for there are none but what may be wrested and perverted to serve bad purposes, either through the weakness or wickedness of men.
Skepticism . . . is not intellectual only it is moral also, a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul.
