ethical quotations

8/22/2019 Ethical Quotations

1/18

Ethical quotations

"Happiness, therefore, does not lie in amusement; it would, indeed, be strange if

the end were amusement, and one were to take trouble and suffer hardship all

one's life in order to amuse oneself. For, in a word, everything that we choose we

choose for the sake of something else except happiness, which is an end. Now

to exert oneself and work for the sake of amusement seems silly and utterly

childish. But to amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself, as Anacharsis

puts it, seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need

relaxation because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end;

for it is taken for the sake of activity."

-- Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

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"This first command of all duties to oneself is "know yourself," not in terms of

your natural perfection but rather in terms of your moral perfection in relation to

your duty. That is, know your heart whether it is good or evil, whether the

source of your actions is pure or impure, and what can be imputed to you asbelonging originally to the substance of a human being or as derived and

belonging to your moral condition.

"Moral cognition of oneself, which seeks to penetrate into the depths (the abyss)

of one's heart which are quite difficult to fathom, is the beginning of all human

wisdom. For in the case of a human being, the ultimate wisdom, which consists in

the harmony of a being's will with its final end, requires him first to remove the

obstacle within (an evil will actually present in him) and then to develop the

original predisposition to a good will within him, which can never be lost. Only the

descent into the hell of self-cognition can pave the way to godliness."

-- Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals

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2/18

"[The] collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are."

-- Isaiah Berlin, "The Pursuit of the Ideal", The Crooked Timber of Humanity

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"Because the math is really complicated people assume it must be right."

-- Nigel Goldenfeld, in "They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street", The New York Times

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"One other frequent error must be mentioned here. The illusion, namely, that

love means necessarily the absence of conflict. Just as it is customary for people

to believe that pain and sadness should be avoided under all circumstances, they

believe that love means the absence of any conflict. And they find good reasons

for this idea in the fact that the struggles around them seem only to be

destructive interchanges which bring no good to either one of those concerned.

But the reason for this lies in the fact that the "conflicts" of most people are

actually attempts to avoid the realconflicts. They are disagreements on minor or

superficial matters which by their very nature do not lend themselves to

clarification or solution. Real conflicts between two people, those which do not

serve to cover up or to project, but which are experienced on the deep level of

inner reality to which they belong, are not destructive. They lead to clarification,

they produce a catharsis from which both persons emerge with more knowledge

and more strength."

-- Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

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"In a progressive country, change is constant; and the great question is not

whether we should resist change, which is inevitable, but whether that change

should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws and

traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract

principles, and arbitrary and general doctrines."
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3/18

-- Benjamin Disraeli, "Speech at Edinburgh on Reform Bill", October 1867

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"Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do

with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-

headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due

to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend

to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to thinkbytalking, which is why

their meetings never last less than six hours."

-- Jonathan Rauch, "Caring for Your Introvert", The Atlantic

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"[I]n a secularized society that has learned to deal with its complexity consciously

and deliberately, the communicative mastery of conflicts constitutes the sole

source of solidarity among strangers strangers who renounce violence and, in

the cooperative regulation of their common life, also concede one another the

right to remain strangers."

-- Jrgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse

Theory of Law and Democracy

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"Through the power of a decisive motivation the act proceeds from the fulness of

life into finite one-sidedness. No matter how it may have been arrived at, it still

expresses only a part of our essence. Potentialities that are contained in this

essence are annihilated through the act. Thus the act separates itself from the

background of a life context. And without explanation of how circumstances, end,

means, and life context are connected in it, it allows no comprehensive

determination of the inner realm in which it originated."

-- Wilhelm Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences
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4/18

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Taipei, Taiwan

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"Marriage always holds your partner's happiness hostage, and the price of

ransom is always your development."

-- David Schnarch, Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in

Committed Relationships

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"The fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must

know that we cannot learn the meaning of the world from the results of its

analysis, be it ever so perfect; it must rather be in a position to create this

meaning itself. It must recognize that general views of life and the universe can

never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest

ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle

with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us."
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5/18

-- Max Weber, ""Objectivity" in Social Science and Social Policy",The Methodology

of the Social Sciences

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"Finally, my friends, mes cheres amis, there's one value we almost never mention

on a political podium. But it seems to me a key liberal value, and I learned it from

my mother. When my mother passed the pie over the table, she would say, "have

a liberal helping". "Liberal" means generous. When my Russian ancestors arrived

in Montreal in 1928, they didn't have much of anything apart from what most

immigrants have courage to try a new life, and the hope that their new country

would take them in. My Russian family found a home, a pays des iles, a foyer

nouveau, un espoir nouveau au Quebec... They were quickly welcomed by the

people of Quebec, they spent the rest of their lives in Quebec. They're all there

my Russian grandparents, now my father, my mother, my uncles and aunts, all

together in a cemetery on a hillside overlooking the St Francis river. So, if you ask

me what Canada means to me, I think of that little graveyard, and I think of the

generosity of strangers who became friends.

"Generosity is more than a welcome to strangers. It is an attitude towards

ourselves. It means trusting each other, helping without counting the cost, taking

risks together. Generosity means leaving our hearts open to others, it means

dreaming together that we could be better than we are. That's how this country

has always been, and it's the job of this party to keep it like that forever."

-- Michael Ignatieff, "Liberal Values in the 21st Century A Speech to the

Convention of the Liberal Party of Canada", March 3, 2005

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"Rights is a child of law; from real law come real rights; but from imaginary laws,

from 'law of nature', come imaginary rights... Natural rights is simple non-sense;

natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical non-sense, nonsense upon stilts."

-- Jeremy Bentham,Anarchical Fallacies
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6/18

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"In a culture where rice is so important, such a staple, the rice cooker can bring a

kind of liberation for women."

-- Shabnam Rezaei, in "The Steamy Way to Dinner", The New York Times

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"The most radical division that is possible to make of humanity is that which

splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on

themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing

special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they

already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection, mere

buoys that float on waves."

-- Jos Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

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"We have all learned to become sensitive to the physical environment. We know

that we depend upon it, that it is fragile, and that we have the power to ruin it,

thereby ruining our own lives, or more probably those of our descendants.

Perhaps fewer of us are sensitive to what we might call the moral or ethical

environment. This is the surrounding climate of ideas about how to live. It

determines what we find acceptable or unacceptable, admirable or contemptible.

It determines our conceptions of when things are going well and when they are

going badly. It determines our conception of what is due to us, and what is due

from us, as we relate to others. It shapes our emotional responses, determining

what is a cause of pride or shame, or anger or gratitude, or what can be forgiven

and what cannot. It gives us our standards our standards of behaviour. In the

eyes of some thinkers, most famously perhaps Hegel, it shapes our very

identities. Our consciousness of ourselves is largely or even essentially a

consciousness of how we stand for other people."
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7/18

-- Simon Blackburn, Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics

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"For all the narcissistic pleasure that comes from poring over clues to my inner

makeup, I soon realized that I was using my knowledge of myself to make sense

of the genetic readout, not the other way around."

-- Steven Pinker, "My Genome, My Self", The New York Times Magazine

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"Much of what now passes for "natural selection" isn't exactly natural. It's social.

As such, it deserves no presumptive respect as a validator or promulgator of

objective fitness. Nor does the discovery of a genetic basis for this or that trait

prove it's more than a social construct. In the era of cultural selection, many

genes are a social construct. Which makes them no less real.

"All of which poses a problem for anyone who equates genes with human nature,

or who expects evolution to take God's place as judge and perfecter of

humankind. It may be true that today's God is a human creation. But so, in a

way, is today's evolution."

-- William Saletan, "Cultural Selection: The Evolution of Evolution",Slate

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"In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is

neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting place nor

appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel."

-- Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays

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8/18

Taipei, Taiwan

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"It is possible to observe during [psycho-analytic] treatment that every

improvement in [the patient's] condition reduces the rate at which he recoversand diminishes the instinctual force impelling him towards recovery. But this

instinctual force is indispensable; reduction of it endangers our aim the

patient's restoration to health. What, then, is the conclusion that forces itself

inevitably upon us? Cruel though it may sound, we must see to it that the

patient's suffering, to a degree that is in some way or other effective, does not

come to an end prematurely. If, owing to the symptoms having been taken apart

and having lost their value, his suffering becomes mitigated, we must re-instate

it elsewhere in the form of some appreciable privation; otherwise we run the

danger of never achieving any improvements except quite insignificant and

transitory ones."

-- Sigmund Freud, "Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy",The Complete

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17

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9/18

"The world of human aspiration is largely fictitious, and if we do not understand

this we understand nothing about man."

-- Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning

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"[T]he true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the

scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy,

liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope."

-- Barack Obama, Acceptance Speech in Chicago, Illinois, Nov. 4, 2008

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"[I]t is not possible to define 'event', 'thing', 'object', 'relationship', and so on,

from nature, but that to define them always involves a circuitous return to the

grammatical categories of the definer's language."

-- Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality

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"To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have

faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king... One reason they're good

at the moment is they live and die on trust, and as soon as you lose trust in

Google, it's over for them."

-- Tim Wu, in "Google's Gatekeepers", The New York Times Magazine

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"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put

moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is

above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of
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10/18

understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are

more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the

flattery of knaves."

-- Edmund Burke,A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 1791

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"It is important to see that we don't just talkabout arguments in terms of war.

We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with

as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own. We gain and

lose ground. We plan and use strategies. If we find a position indefensible, we

can abandon it and take a new line of attack. Many of the things we doin arguing

are partially structured by the concept of war. Though there is no physical battle,

there is a verbal battle, and the structure of an argument attack, defense,

counterattack, etc. reflects this. It is in this sense that the ARGUMENT IS WAR

metaphor is one that we live by in this culture; it structures the actions we

perform in arguing."

-- George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

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"Hes looking a lot more presidential now; he walks a little different."

-- Zariff, in "For Obama and Family, a Personal Transition", The New York Times

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"A man's work is nothing but a slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art,

those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first

opened."

-- Albert Camus, Betwixt and Between

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11/18

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Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Cambodia

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"Generosity, unity, sovereignty, justice. The courage to choose, the will to

govern. These are the beacons of a liberal politics."

-- Michael Ignatieff, "Speech to the Convention of the Liberal Party of Canada",

March 3, 2005

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"The new "theory of justice" [by philosopher John Rawls] demands that men

counteract the "injustice" of nature by instituting the most obscenely unthinkable

injustice among men: deprive "those favored by nature" (i.e., the talented, the

intelligent, the creative) of the right to the rewards they produce (i.e., the right to

life) and grant to the incompetent, the stupid, the slothful a right to the
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12/18

effortless enjoyment of the rewards they could not produce, could not imagine,

and would not know what to do with."

-- Ayn Rand, "An Untitled Letter", Philosophy: Who Needs It

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"For good people are just good, while bad people are bad in all sorts of ways."

-- Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

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"Behind the two divergent attitudes of the anthropologist who is a critic at home

and a conformist abroad, there lies, then, another contradiction from which he

finds it even more difficult to escape. If he wishes to contribute to the

improvement of his own community, he must condemn social conditions similar

to those he is fighting against, wherever they exist, in which case he relinquishes

his objectivity and impartiality. Conversely, the detachment to which he is

constrained by moral scrupulousness and scientific accuracy prevents him from

criticizing his own society, since he is refraining from judging any one society in

order to acquire knowledge of them all. Action within one's own society precludes

understanding of other societies, but a thirst for universal understanding involves

renouncing all possibility of reform."

-- Claude Lvi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

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"Weve picked bad presidents before, and weve survived as a nation, but we will

not survive if we lose the institution of marriage."

-- Tony Perkins, in "A Line in the Sand for Same-Sex Marriage Foes", The New

York Times

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13/18

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"How will Hong Kong, freshly and profoundly dependent on China, define itself?

Will it be eclipsed by Shanghai and Beijing or evolve a distinctive cultural

identity?... Official Web sites, as well as banners, buses and billboards across the

city, declare Hong Kong "Asia's world city." There may be some truth in this.

Shanghai and Beijing are, despite their glossy Western veneers, profoundly

Chinese cities, marked by vast hinterlands and dominated by Mandarin speakers.

I have never felt anything but a foreigner in them, whereas Hong Kong, whose

economic foundations were laid by foreign businessmen and Chinese fleeing war

and revolution on the mainland, has always struck me as the New World to

China's Old, the place where new, plural identities are possible."

-- Pankaj Mishra, "Hong Kong's Moment", T: The New York Times Style Magazine

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"While Socrates and minds of his stamp may be able to acquire virtue through

reason, mankind would long ago have ceased to be if its preservation had

depended solely on the reasonings of those who make it up."

-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality

Among Men

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"How can we get more organs? By redefining death."

-- William Saletan, "Undead Babies: The Retreating Boundaries of Organ

Harvesting", Slate

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"We say we want a renewal of character in our day but we don't really know what

we ask for. To have a renewal of character is to have a renewal of a creedal order

that constrains, limits, binds, obligates, and compels. This price is too high for us
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14/18

to pay. We want character but without unyielding conviction; we want strong

morality but without the emotional burden of guilt or shame; we want virtue but

without particular moral justifications that invariably offend; we want good

without having to name evil; we want decency without the authority to insist

upon it; we want moral community without any limitation to personal freedom. In

short, we want what we cannot possibly have on the terms that we want it."

-- James Davison Hunter, The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age

Without Good Or Evil

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"I don't consider myself a Chicagoan. I consider myself a Hyde Parker."

-- Richard Epstein, in "Uncommon Ground", The Washington Post

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"Knowing that his audiences are capable of forming bad impressions of him, the

individual may come to feel ashamed of a well-intentioned honest act merely

because the context of its performance provides false impressions that are bad.

Feeling this unwarranted shame, he may feel that his feelings can be seen;

feeling that he can be seen, he may feel that his appearance confirms these false

conclusions concerning him. He may then add to the precariousness of his

position by engaging in just those defensive maneuvers that he would employ

were he really guilty. In this way it is possible for all of us to become fleetingly for

ourselves the worst person we can imagine that others might imagine us to be."

-- Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

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15/18

Angkor, Cambodia

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"There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves

manifest. They are what is mystical."

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

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"I put national unity at the centre of our project as a party and as a people. But it

matters not just to us. It matters to the world. This is something I see from afar.

From afar, we're a very special and precious experiment. We're an experiment as

to whether a multicultural, multilingual society can survive and prosper. If we

can't do it, ladies and gentlemen, no one else can. And the future of all

multiethnic, multicultural societies will be grim indeed. That's why there's a

global stake in us getting this story right.

"We are a ray of light in a gloomy world, a ray of hope in a world which is in fact

ravaged by intolerance and by hatred. Let's get it right. The world does look to

us, the world does ask us, "get it right, show us how". Communities of difference,
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16/18

communities of different languages can live together, can forge a unity together.

You're doing it in this hall tonight but never forget that we truly are a light unto

the nations, and we must never forget that in the daily life of our politics.

"Now, there are countries to the south of us that believe in life, liberty, and the

pursuit of happiness. And these countries that shall remain nameless want to

export freedom and democracy to the world. And because we're Canadians,

we're skeptics. We don't like rhetoric that's that high flung. We got some doubts

about the project. We have doubts about the American dream. Ok. But let's

remember that we have a dream. Because we are the people of peace, order,

and good government.

"From Sri Lanka to Iraq, from South Africa to the Ukraine, we can help promote

democratic federalism for multiethnic, multilingual states. Exporting peace,

order, and good government has to be the core of a Canadian foreign policy, that

doesn't try to be everything to everybody, doesn't try to do everything, but

focuses on what is the unique achievement of this federation, on our national

history together. That's the story we want to sell and promote to the world. If

we're divided, we have no dream to share. If we're fragmented, we have no story

to tell. But united, believe me, we will be a light unto the nations, and a beacon

unto the world."

-- Michael Ignatieff, "Speech to the Convention of the Liberal Party of Canada",

March 3, 2005

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"Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the

laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners

are what vex or smooth, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us,

by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we

breathe in. They give their whole form and colour to our lives. According to their

quality, they aid morals, they support them, or they totally destroy them."

-- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France0 COMMENTS
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17/18

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"What, then, is truth? A movable army of metaphors, metonymies,

anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been

subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and

which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly

established, canonical, and binding; truths are illusions of which we have

forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent

use and have lost all sensual vigour, coins which, having lost their stamp, are

now regarded as metal and no longer as coins."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense

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"At intimate suppers, on hunts, in conversations between two or three men,

matters of state of the most vital importance are decided. Meetings of party

forums, conferences of the government and assemblies, serve no purpose but to

make declarations and put in an appearance."

-- Milovan Djilas, The New Class

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"Whatever interests and concerns us puts itself in the place of what is strange

and uninteresting. After-images of earlier thoughts trouble new perceptions."

-- Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis

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"At fifteen I set my heart upon learning. At thirty, I had planted my feet firm upon

the ground. At forty, I no longer suffered from perplexities. At fifty, I knew what

were the biddings of Heaven. At sixty, I heard them with docile ear. At seventy, I

could follow the dictates of my own heart; for what I desired no longer

overstepped the boundaries of right."
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18/18

-- Confucius, The Analects

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"One curious thing that separates the social from the natural sciences is that thenatural sciences, with much fanfare, immediately communicate to the general

public their most exciting new ideas: the social sciences tend to nurse their

significant insights in scholarly oblivion. As a result people feel that the social

sciences are not doing anything important or exciting. But the opposite is true:

probably the most thrilling and potentially liberating discoveries have been made

in the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology

"But we have also known for a long time that one of the reasons the social

sciences work in oblivion is that they are not getting at knowledge that instantly

makes people feel powerful and satisfied, that gives them the sense that they aretaming their world, taking command of its mystery and danger. The science of

man is the science of man's knowledge about himself: it gives a chill in addition

to a thrill the chill of self-exposure. We may be the only species in the universe,

for all we know, that has pushed self-exposure to such an advanced point that we

are no longer a secret to ourselves... the exposure of this secret is in many ways

very unsettling."

-- Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning (1971)
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