“Deplorable practices adopted during the last century were repeatedly declared necessary if regrettable in order to win the war. Oddly enough, we ve yet to win. You d think somebody would have asked before this why the regrettable but necessary measures haven t actually produced the promised results.”
“Counsel involving right and wrong should never be sought from a man who does not say his prayers.”
“Without ethics, science would be cruelty.”
“The limitation of the ethical phenomenon to its place and time does not imply its rejection but, on the contrary, its validation. One does not use canons to shoot sparrows.”
“Our gods, if we choose to believe in them, must be forced to live up to ethics that far surpass our own human standards. If they fall short of the ethical conditions we place upon ourselves, what use are they to us - except to rationalize our own failures?”
“Buddha wrote a code which he said would be useful to guide men in darkness, but he never claimed to be the Light of the world. Buddhism was born with a disgust for the world, when a prince s son deserted his wife and child, turning from the pleasures of existence to the problems of existence. Burnt by the fires of the world, and already weary with it, Buddha turned to ethics.”
“Since I was a small girl, I have lived inside this cottage, shelted by its roof and walls. I have known of people suffering—I have not been blind to them in the way that privilege allows, the way my own husband and now my daughter are blind. It is a statement of fact and not a judgement to say Charlie and Ella’s minds aren’t oriented in that direction; in a way, it absolves them, whereas the unlucky have knocked on the door of my consciousness, they have emerged from the forest and knocked many times over the course of my life, and I have only occasionally allowed them entry. I’ve done more than nothing and much less than I could have. I have laid inside, beneath a quilt on a comfortable couch, in a kind of reverie, and when I heard the unlucky outside my cottage, sometimes I passed them coins or scraps of food, and sometimes I ignored them altogether; if I ignored them, they had no choice but to walk back into the woods, and when they grew weak or got lost or were circled by wolves, I pretended I couldn’t hear them calling my name.”
“Each of us lives with a sword over his head. There are those who can ignore its shadow and those who cannot. Those who cannot are not necessarily better than those who can. But they are the creators of the special myth of their time, because any myth is the creation of the very few who cannot bear reality.”
“... primitive times had required primitive obedience, that later generations evolved to the point where parents offered themselves as sacrifice - as in the dark knights of the ovens which pocked old earth history - and that current generations had to deny any command for sacrifice. Sol had written that whatever God now took in human consciousness - whether as a mere manifestation of the subconscious in all its revanchist needs or as a more conscious attempt at philosophical and ethical evolution - humankind could no longer agree to offer up sacrifice in God s name. Sacrifice and the agreement to sacrifice had written human history in blood.”
“ethics is not about platitudes, let alone tautologies, logic or mathematics, but about difficult choices - dilemmas.”
“No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual s individual code of behavior, by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol—cross or crescent or whatever—that symbol is man s reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot teach man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral code and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope.”
“Une éthique véritablement socialiste, c est-à-dire qui cherche la justice sans supprimer la liberté, qui impose aux individus des charges mais sans abolir l individualité, se trouvera fort embarrassée par les problèmes que pose la condition de la femme.”
“There are already plenty of people who will take a firm stand on the need to be competely impartial between right and wrong.”
“Evolution, energy, and ethics are the core elements that will guide us along the challenging path toward the Life Era: the first - evolution - because a good understanding of our universal roots and of our place in the cosmic scheme of things will help us create a feasible future course; the second - energy - because our fate will bear strongly on the ways that humankind learns to use energy efficiently and safely; and the third - ethics - because global citizenship and a planetary society are crucial factors in the survival of our species.”
“Would you agree, he said, that man s sole duty is to produce as much pleasure as possible? Only if the pleasure produced is equivalent to the diminution of pain. My father crossed his arms. And only if one man s pleasure is as important as any other s.”