#Ethics

"Atheism is a way of humility. It's to think oneself to be an animal, as we are actually and to allow oneself to become human."

"Rejection is an opportunity for your selection."

"The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind."

"What’s the point of being the first to arrive? Nobody is there to witness your commitment."

"Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose."

"I think the key indicator for wealth is not good grades, work ethic, or IQ. I believe it's relationships. Ask yourself two questions: How many people do I know, and how much ransom money could I get for each one?"

"To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil."

"My hope is that people will be repulsed by the character's complete lack of ethics and obsession with consumerism - that's what I was saying about the difference between the character's message and the film's message."

"Success is not an activity but a process."

"The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence."

"We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained."

"When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don't believe as you do."

"The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death. There is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions which makes it hard to change, and hard to raise questions on the matter at all without becoming embattled."

"Thus I assume that to each according to his threat advantage is not a conception of justice."

"What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives."

"The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest-Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure."

"The five points of yama, together with the five points of niyama, remind us of the Ten Commandments of the Christtian and Jewish faiths, as well as of the ten virtues of Buddhism. In fact, there is no religion without these moral or ethical codes. All spiritual life should be based on these things. They are the foundation stones without which we can never build anything lasting. (127)"

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."

"If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame."

"What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did."