All Quotes

"{referring to a hamster at the door} I think we could bite its head off or whatever."

"{responding to Betsy Ross} Hey chill! Take your time."

""Well, you know what they say: "If you want to save the world, you gotta push a few old ladies down the stairs"."

""This must be that Woodstock place Mom and Dad always talk about"."

"Cosmotheism is a religion which positively asserts there is an internal meaning and purpose in life and in the cosmos. There is an essential unity, or consciousness that binds all living beings and all of the inorganic cosmos, as one. And what our true identity is this: we are the cosmos, made self-aware and self-conscious by evolution. Our undeniable human purpose, is to know and to complete ourselves as conscious individuals, and also as a self-aware species, and thereby to co-evolve with the cosmos towards total and universal awareness, and towards the ever-higher perfection of consciousness and being."

"Although an older edition of Webster's dictionary defines 'cosmotheism' as synonymous with pantheism, the term has taken on certain connotations in modern usage, owing chiefly to its use by Dr. William Pierce to describe his racially-hierarchical system of thought. Cosmotheism as it appears today, promoted chiefly on the internet, is widely considered to be a racist ideology which has appropriated the terminology of pantheism in order to legitimize itself."

"There is an increasing number of White Supremacist hate groups who try to leap onto the fashionable bandwagon of eco-spirituality in order to recruit members for their own warped ideology."

"We cannot cast a magic spell to make the nasties go away. It is even questionable from a democratic point of view whether ‘making them go away’ would be desirable. However, we should be alert and try to ‘ban’ these sort of nazi-characters from our own Internet pages and discussion forums. We should inform those new to Pantheism that the large majority of Pantheism is in fact benevolent and that these hate-groups luckily form a tiny, but loud, minority. Let’s make sure they stay that way."

"Neo-nazis try to infiltrate all sorts of religions and philosophies in order to recruit. We are not the only victims in their book. Nonetheless, their presence is a blemish on the blossom of Pantheism. But the blossom in itself is still as radiant as ever. Don’t be deterred from Pantheism because of a few hate-filled fringe groups."

"If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes."

"Relativism is not indifference; on the contrary, passionate indifference is necessary in order for you not to hear the voices that oppose your absolute decrees."

"The greatest danger to our future is apathy."

"The more the Jew is a Jew, the more universalist will his views and aspirations be, the less aloof will he be from anything that is noble and good, true and upright, in art or science, in culture or education; the more joyfully will he applaud whenever he sees truth and justice and peace and the ennoblement of man prevail and become dominant in human society."

"Most people are indifferent, unless their self-interest is at stake. Then there are the chronic complainers."

"We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind."

"Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all."

"Indifference, if let alone, will produce obduracy; and obduracy, if let alone, will produce torment."

"Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing."

"Yes, we all know that curiosity killed the cat, but indifference kills people, both physically and metaphorically, every single day, when it surrenders to despots, aggressors, and villains."

"There are few signs in a soul's state more alarming than that of religious indifference, that is, the spirit of thinking all religions equally true — the real meaning of which is, that all religions are equally false."

"Once you have glimpsed the world as it might be, as it ought to be, as it's going to be (however that vision appears to you), it is impossible to live compliant and complacent anymore in the world as it is."

"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity."

"He who has never hoped can never despair."

"In any election, only a percentage of the people vote. Those who can't vote because of age or other disqualifications, and those who don't vote because of confusion, apathy, or disgust at a Tweedledum-Tweedledummer choice can hardly be said to have any voice in the passage of the laws which govern them. Nor can the individuals as yet unborn, who will be ruled by those laws in the future."

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death."

"Apathy is the glove in which evil slips its hand."

", adj. Conforming to a local and mutable standard of right. Having the quality of general expediency."

": It is sayd there be a raunge of mountaynes in the Easte, on one syde of the which certayn conducts are immorall, yet on the other syde they are holden in good esteeme; wherebye the mountayneer is much conveenyenced, for it is given to him to goe downe eyther way and act as it shall suite his moode, withouten offence. —Gooke's Meditations"

", adj. Inexpedient. Whatever in the long run and with regard to the greater number of instances men find to be generally inexpedient comes to be considered wrong, wicked, immoral. If man's notions of right and wrong have any other basis than this of expediency; if they originated, or could have originated, in any other way; if actions have in themselves a moral character apart from, and nowise dependent on, their consequences—then all philosophy is a lie and reason a disorder of the mind."

"Morality's not practical. Morality's a gesture. A complicated gesture learnt from books."

"Wisdom is purified by morality, and morality is purified by wisdom: where one is, the other is, the moral man has wisdom and the wise man has morality, and the combination of morality of wisdom is called the highest thing in the world."

"Tut, tut, child," said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral if only you can find it."

"There are two principles of established acceptance in morals; first, that self-interest is the mainspring of all of our actions, and secondly, that utility is the test of their value."

"To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision."

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."

"We frolic in our emancipation from theology, but have we developed a natural ethic — a moral code independent of religion — strong enough to keep our instincts of acquisition, pugnacity, and sex from debasing our civilization into a mire of greed, crime, and promiscuity? Have we really outgrown intolerance, or merely transferred it from religious to national, ideological, or racial hostilities?"

"Cowardice, caressed by Christianity, creates morality."

"It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality."

"Our moral traditions, like many other aspects of our culture, developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product."

"So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."

"Plausible moral theory must have at its center a concern for the lives and well-being of persons...It is presumptively wrong to do violence to innocent persons...a necessary condition of the justifiable pursuit of an any objectives in war by any means whatsoever...is that one be justified in engaging in such killing and violence in the first place."

"There is a principle, supposed to prevail among many, which is utterly incompatible with all virtue or moral sentiment; and as it can proceed from nothing but the most depraved disposition, so in its turn it tends still further to encourage that depravity. This principle is, that all benevolence is mere hypocrisy, friendship a cheat, public spirit a farce, fidelity a snare to procure trust and confidence; and that while all of us, at bottom, pursue only our private interest, we wear these fair disguises, in order to put others off their guard, and expose them the more to our wiles and machinations."

"The main objection to absolute morality is that even if there were absolute moral standards we should have no way of knowing whether we had found them."

"When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men. When we foolishly minimize the internal of our lives and maximize the external, we sign the warrant for our own day of doom."

"Society has made it so I have to get paid in order to do basic things like eat and be indoors and not be naked. Once that happened, morality’s bound to get slippery."

"Though the customs be both good as customs, and suitable to him, yet to conform to custom, merely as custom, does not educate or develop in him any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being. The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, no more than by believing a thing only because others believe it."

"Dionysus used to laugh at professors who did research into the bad qualities of Ulysses yet knew nothing of their own; at musicians whose flutes were harmonious but not their morals; at orators whose studies led to talking about justice, not to being just."

"Herren-Moral und Sklaven-Moral. [Master-morality and slave-morality.]"

"All systems of morality are fine. The gospel alone has exhibited a complete assemblage of the principles of morality, divested of all absurdity. It is not composed, like your creed, of a few common-place sentences put into bad verse. Do you wish to see that which is really sublime? Repeat the Lord's Prayer."

"All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed, Do What Thou Wilt; because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour."