Moral Dilemmas Quotes

Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?

Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts; and if we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are 'done away' and the rest is a matter of flying.

Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.

I am not a political writer. I agree with Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, who are social writers. I can't write in that fashion. I am not good enough for that. What I am interested in is family dramas and why we are doing bad things to each other and what our motives are.

I always go back to Harry Truman: Should we drop an atomic bomb to save 100,000 lives? That's a hell of a decision to make. Did he make that decision by himself? No, he had advisers.

My work is based on the assumption that clarity and consistency in our moral thinking is likely, in the long run, to lead us to hold better views on ethical issues.

When we cracked the genetic DNA code, opened the big Pandora's box, and it really did become possible to produce chimeras, my ears shot up. Having been brought up among the biologists and having followed various debates about ways to improve the human template and other debates about the true nature of our nature, I began seriously to wonder: What if? We hold in our hands a tool that is more powerful - for good or ill - than any we have wielded before.

I'm a human being who lives a flawed, contradictory life. And I have all sorts of problems and all sorts of successes.

sometimes in life doing what we shouldn't do is the emergency

Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer.

The great political questions are in their final analysis great moral questions.

All evils are to be considered with the good that is in them, and with what worse attends them.

Honor is a public enemy, and conscience a domestic, and he that would secure his pleasure, must pay a tribute to one and go halves with t'other.

Each generation, as it seeks to advance the common good, must ask anew: 'What are the requirements that governments may reasonably impose upon citizens, and how far do they extend? By appeal to what authority can moral dilemmas be resolved?'

Working as a journalist is exactly like being a wallflower at an orgy.

I am excited to be doing 'SVU' - I think there's a lot of inherent drama and a lot of inherent conflict in procedural shows. I have a lot of respect for police officers and the work that they do. There's a lot of nobility to depicting what these officers do on a day to day basis.

America has this fascination with glorifying the villain and not talking about the trials and tribulations. We tell the story of the successful villain a lot of times, but we don't tell the story of the people who don't come out so successful, and we don't tell the story of all the bystanders of that choice.

One evades discussion of serious issues by the simple device of passing them off as value problems, whereas, to say the least, many of these conflicts arose out of man’s very agreement regarding values.

The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.

In movies and in television the robots are always evil. I guess I am not into the whole brooding cyberpunk dystopia thing.

One way to determine if a view is inadequate is to check its consequences in particular cases, sometimes extreme ones, but if someone always decided what the result should be in any case by applying the given view itself, this would preclude discovering it did not correctly fit the case. Readers who hold they would plug in to the machine should notice whether their first impulse was not to do so, followed later by the thought that since only experiences could matter, the machine would be all right after all.

There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.

Sin is what is new, strong, surprising, strange. The theatre must take an interest in sin if the young are to be able to go there.

If we want to have good workers and good citizens, we need to create common spaces in which individuals can talk about the moral and ethical dilemmas that they have faced and how they resolve them.

Religious questions have often led to wicked and impious actions.