“Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.”
“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”
“It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health.”
“I obviously do everything to be hard to understand myself”
“If there were a party of those who aren t sure they re right, I d belong to it. (as quoted by Tony Judt)”
“But with dogs, we do have bad dog. Bad dog exists. Bad dog! Bad dog! Stole a biscuit, bad dog! The dog is saying, Who are you to judge me? You human beings who’ve had genocide, war against people of different creeds, colors, religions, and I stole a biscuit?! Is that a crime? People of the world! Well, if you put it that way, I think you’ve got a point. Have another biscuit, sorry.”
“Animals are more than ever a test of our character, of mankind s capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship. We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality, but in a sense because they don t; because they all stand unequal and powerless before us.”
“True education does not consist merely in the acquiring of a few facts of science, history, literature, or art, but in the development of character.”
“You re trying to be tricky. What s morality? It s the difference between what s right and what you can rationalize. Must be a human thing. Exactly.”
“In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all. ”
“The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.”
“I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”
“We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one which we preach, but do not practice, and another which we practice, but seldom preach.”
“By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were. ...Our creed is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don t.”
“The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.”
“In the simple moral maxim the Marine Corps teaches — do the right thing, for the right reason — no exception exists that says: unless there s criticism or risk. Damn the consequences.”
“The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death. There is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions which makes it hard to change, and hard to raise questions on the matter at all without becoming embattled.”