Idealist: a cynic in the making.

Idealist: a cynic in the making.

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in
our actions. Our inner balance and even our read more

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in
our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence
depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and
dignity to life.

The principles we live by, in business and in social life, are the most important part of happiness.

The principles we live by, in business and in social life, are the most important part of happiness.

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a read more

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age read more

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.

Ah! How neatly tied, in these people, is the umbilical cord of morality! Since they left their mothers they have read more

Ah! How neatly tied, in these people, is the umbilical cord of morality! Since they left their mothers they have never sinned, have they? They are apostles, they are the descendants of priests; one can only wonder from what source they draw their indignation, and above all how much they have pocketed to do this, and in any case what it has done for them.

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one
of its periodical fits of morality.

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one
of its periodical fits of morality.

The American elite is almost beyond redemption. . . . Moral
relativism has set in so deeply that the read more

The American elite is almost beyond redemption. . . . Moral
relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have
become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can
be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great
moral mush--sophistry washed down with Chardonnay. The ordinary
citizens, thank goodness, still adhere to absolutes. . . . It is
they who have saved the republic from creeping degradation while
their "betters" were derelict.

We may pretend that we're basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.

We may pretend that we're basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.