“A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.”
“It s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”
“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.”
“To educate a person in the mind but not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”
“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”
“Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.”
“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
“I have gained this by philosophy … I do without being ordered what some are constrained to do by their fear of the law.”
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I ll meet you there.”
“Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God s approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That s not morality, that s just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though.”
“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.”
“Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.”
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
“In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.”
“I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.”