ethics

"Spinoza: the absolute philosopher, whose Ethics is the foremost book on concepts."

"A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes that there is no virtue but on his own side, and that there are not men as honest as himself who may differ from him in politica…"

"Christianity is not so much the advent of a better doctrine as of a perfect character."

"The potential infinite means nothing other than an undetermined, variable quantity, always remaining finite, which has to assume values that either become smaller than any finite limit no matter how s…"

"Muslims shared many of the deep-seated characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon elite—an intuitive resentment of culture, an amicable contempt for women, a proclivity for riding about on horses, a pleasure …"

"Virtue has great power, but not if it is imposed – only when it is chosen."

"Selfishness does not mean only to do things for one's self. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality."

"Men who have sacrifice their well-being, and even their lives, for the cause of truth or the public good, are, from an empirical point of view - which scorn virtue and altruism - regarded as insane or…"

"The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness."

"The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice. Moral truisms have been so much disputed that they have begun to sparkle like so many brilliant paradoxes."

"Morality is thus the relation of actions to the autonomy of the will, that is, to a possible giving of universal law through its maxims. An action that can coexist with the autonomy of the will is per…"

"My characters are ambiguous. Call them that. I don't mind. I am ambiguous myself. Who isn't?"

"It's much more a matter of playing the characters as they were written by the authors, because of the liberties that have been taken with pretty much all of them. They've all been distorted in one way…"

"There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might be the most immoral desire a man can possess."

"Morgenbesser described ethics as entailing “ought implies can” while in Jewish ethics “can implies don’t."

"As much as we admire all the characteristics of a Ronald Reagan, as soon as something goes wrong, people will hate those same characteristics."

"In these two essays the focus is upon ways of simplifying the choice problem to bring it within the power of human computation... The key to the simplification of the choice process in both cases is t…"

"My position and the state will never allow me to become a dictator, but an authoritarian style of rule is characteristic of me, and I have always admitted it. You need to control the country, and the …"

"Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way."

"Many church folk, in their self-conscious attempt to be overtly morally upright, emit all the wrong signals, thus messing with people’s perception of the gospel."