“Further generations will find nothing ‘ethical’ about twentieth and twenty-first century Judeo-Christian ethics; they will find the morality in this system equivalent to that of Christianity in the Dark Ages, ever dark indeed!” ——Gary Amirault
“If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it… The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” ——Edward Bernays
“Things that will destroy man: Politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; worship without sacrifice.” ——Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi
“I owe everything to the gift of Pentecost. For fifty days the facts of the Gospel were complete, but no conversions were recorded. Pentecost registered three thousand souls. It is by fire that a holy passion is kindled in the soul whereby we live the life of God. The soul’s safety is in its heat. Truth without enthusiasm, morality without emotion, ritual without soul, make for a Church without power… Destitute of the Fire of God, nothing else counts; possessing Fire, nothing else matters.” ——Samuel Chadwick
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” ——John Kenneth Galbraith
“Suffering and joy teach us, if we allow them, how to make the leap of empathy, which transports us into the soul and heart of another person. In those transparent moments we know other people’s joys and sorrows, and we care about their concerns as if they were our own.” ——Fritz Williams
“It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.” ——Samuel Johnson
“…when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.” ——Sogyal Rinpoche
“Who can separate his faith from his actions, or his belief from his occupations?” ——Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
“You know your country is dying when you have to make a distinction between what is moral and ethical, and what is legal.” ——John De Armond
“No man can emancipate himself, except by emancipating with him all the men around him. My liberty is the liberty of everyone, for I am not truly free, free not only in thought but in deed, except when my liberty and my rights find their confirmation, their sanction, in the liberty and the rights of all men, my equals.” ——Bakunin
“Tolerance implies a respect for another person, not because he is wrong or even because he is right, but because he is human.” ——John Cogley, Source: Commonwealth, 24 April 1959
“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.” ——Arundhati Roy
“It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.” ——Friedrich August von Hayek (1899–1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974. Source: The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 146.
“Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?” ——Lillian Hellman, American playwright and memoirist (1905–1984)
“Violence is shrouded in justifying myths that lend it moral legitimacy, and these myths for the most part kept people from recognizing the violence for what it was. The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they though of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed.” ——Gil Bailie
“What’s wrong with our children? Adults telling children to be honest while lying and cheating. Adults telling children to not be violent while marketing and glorifying violence… I believe that adult hypocrisy is the biggest problem children face in America.” ——Marian Wright Edelman, Children’s Advocate (1939– )
“The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice.” ——Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi
“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.” ——H. L. Mencken
“It is part of human nature to hate the man you have hurt.” ——Tacitus (c. AD 56–177)
“Judeo-Christian Ethics? An oxymoron of the most hypocritical kind.” ——Emet Tsedeq
Sometimes in the name of country, flag, pride, nationalism, duty, we don’t think through our values. Often we find ourselves filled with contradictions, because our convictions come from other men/women and their institutions, not from our inner convictions or from God. We can actually become or produce blind killers never realizing in our conscience what we have become. But our subconscious knows. America’s drug and alcohol addictions are a symptom of what we dare not look at — that our “ethics” are that of cavemen and what we call “civilized” is nothing more than barbarism.
“The lowest standards of ethics of which a right-thinking man can possibly conceive is taught to the common soldier whose trade is to shoot his fellow men. In youth he may have learned the command, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but the ruler takes the boy just as he enters manhood and teaches him that his highest duty is to shoot a bullet through his neighbor’s heart – and this, unmoved by passion or feeling or hatred, and without the least regard to right or wrong, but simply because his ruler gives the word.” ——Clarence Darrow, Resist Not Evil