“Right and wrong applies to internet interaction. It s #Netiquette. NetworkEtiquette.net”
“There are normal times when it is wholly admirable to be steadfast, resolute, unconflicted, and therefore when integrity is unmistakenly a virtue. The person of integrity knows what to do, and does it. But as we have been exploring, there are also times when certainty and single-mindedness indicate something less admirable: a deafness to voices that should be heard or a blindness to aspects of a situation that need to be considered.”
“The superstitious know how to reproach people for their vices better than they know how to teach them virtues, and they strive, not to guide men by reason, but to restrain them by fear, so that they flee the evil rather than love virtues. Such people aim only to make others as wretched as they themselves are, so it is no wonder that they are generally burdensome and hateful to men.”
“Face the complexity involved in making ethical choices.”
“This place is like the Army: the shark ethic prevails--eat the wounded. In a closed society where everybody s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.”
“Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which Nietzsche s thought is the ancestor. Indeed just because and insofar as contemporary Marxism is Weberian in substance we can expect prophetic irrationalisms of the left as well as of the Right.”
“It is now an easy matter to spell out the ethic of a truth: Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds you perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you.”
“Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.”
“He believed that every individual was responsible for his conduct on earth, that there was a judge within. Could even a blazingly Christ inflict greater retribution? Could Dante s Charon in his rowboat on the river Acheron whip the miscreants into a deeper, more everlasting hell than man s unvarnished verdict of himself?”
“I think if you cheat in a ethics class then there s really no hope for you.”
“The widespread assumption that ethical behavior takes the fun out of life is false. In actuality, living ethically ensures that relationships in our lives, including encounters with strangers, nurture our spiritual growth.”
“There is always only one question in the ethics of truth: how will I, as some-one, continue to exceed my own being?”
“Narrative is an open-ended invitation to ethical and poetical responsiveness. Storytelling invites us to become not just agents of our own lives, but narrators and readers as well. It shows us that the untold life is not worth living. There will always be someone there to say, tell me a story , and someone there to respond. Were this not so, we would no longer be fully human.”
“Our treatment of animals, in every department, is deeply and systematically immoral. Becoming a vegetarian is only the most minimal ethical response to the magnitude of the evil.”
“if [God] doesn t exist, man is the chief of the earth, of the universe. Magnificent! Only how is he going to be good without God?”
“It is different with the upper classes. They, following science, want to base justice on reason alone, but not with Christ, as before, and they have already proclaimed that there is no crime, that there is no sin. And that s consistent, for if you have no God what is the meaning of crime?”
“Seek not that your sons and your daughters should not see visions, should not dream dreams; seek that they should see true visions, that they should dream noble dreams. Such out-going of the imagination is one with aspiration, and will do more to elevate above what is low and vile than all possible inculcations of morality.”