David Weber Quotes

The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil...

Every good teaching may still end up producing evil bandits who have no principles whatsoever, an outcome even more likely when the teacher is also a bandit.

We cannot teach children the danger of telling lies to men without realising, on the man's part, the danger of telling lies to children. A single untruth on the part of the master will destroy the results of his education.

Father asked us what was God's noblest work. Anna said men, but I said babies. Men are often bad, but babies never are.

To do no evil is good, to intend none better.

Evil is a source of moral intelligence in the sense that we need to learn from our shadow, from our dark side, in order to be good.

Nobody is born evil.

Piety is the most solid goodness, and the vilest of what is evil is vice.

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

Give me a child for the first 7 years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards.

Being against evil doesn't make you good.

No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.

Little boldness is needed to assail the opinions and practices of notoriously wicked men; but to rebuke great and good men for their conduct, and to impeach their discernment, is the highest effort of moral courage.

The act of feeling what you believe other people feel is morally corosive.... If we want to be good and caring people, if we want to make the world a better place, then we are better off withouit empathy.

Parents: instead of teaching our children to be brave boys or pretty girls, can we maybe just teach them how to be good humans?

Nobody starts out evil - we know that. It's life circumstances that lead them to that.

Growing up a good person, it's a lot harder than you'd think.

I firmly believe there are no bad people.

My parents are naive in their morality of things, and so, without realising it, I landed up being ethical and having strong opinions.

The formation of character in young people is educationally a different task from, and a prior task to, the discussion of the great, difficult, ethical controversies of the day. First things first. And planting the ideas of virtue, of good traits in the young, comes first. In the moral life, as in life itself, we take one step at a time. Every field has its complexities and controversies. And so does ethics. And every field has its basics. So too with values.

A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world - intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man.

I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.' Rose didn't answer; the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil.

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. To make this a living force and bring it to clear consciousness is perhaps the foremost task of education. The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.

Virtue is persecuted by the wicked more than it is loved by the good.

Evil is not interesting. What is it, chopping off someone's head? We used to do that as kids, you know, you tear up paper dolls and stuff. I know everyone's done it in the history of the world, but maybe everybody was dumb and they were just looking for something interesting to do. What's really interesting and hard is being good.