Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning,--an
endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea read more

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning,--an
endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the
distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly
bodies.

It is difficult to offend a New Yorker.

It is difficult to offend a New Yorker.

Everywhere, the ethical predicament of our time imposes itself with an urgency which suggests that even the question "Have we read more

Everywhere, the ethical predicament of our time imposes itself with an urgency which suggests that even the question "Have we anything to eat?" will be answered not in material but in ethical terms.

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.

What I have absolutely no sympathy with is the legislator, the man who seeks, for his own profit, to exploit read more

What I have absolutely no sympathy with is the legislator, the man who seeks, for his own profit, to exploit the weaknesses of those who are unable to help themselves and then to fasten some moral superscription upon it. This I loathe so much that I cannot conceivably explain how much it is.

The end never really justifies the meanness.

The end never really justifies the meanness.

To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.

To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.

Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that read more

Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good ;consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.