Thomas Carlyle Quotes

Strength and strength's will are the supreme ethic. All else are dreams from hospital beds, the sly, crawling goodness of sneaking souls.

Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.

There being no absolute and universal standard of right, terrorism must be held to be wrong in every case.

You cannot institute any equality between right and wrong.

History requires us to judge the figures of the past not by our moral standards but by those of the ages in which they lived and worked.

Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good, and evil, in the conversation, and society of mankind. Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites, and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different.

I want to give moral relativism the good spanking it deserves.

Virtue and vice are not arbitrary things; but there is a natural and eternal reason for goodness and virtue, and against vice and wickedness.

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

Morality is the thing upon which your friends smile, and immorality is the thing upon which they frown

Morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil.

There is only one morality, as there is only one geometry.

Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson.

If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.

Philosophy rests on a proposition that whatever is is right. Preaching begins by assuming that whatever is is wrong.

Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

Either what we hold to be right and good and true IS right and good and true, for all mankind, or we're just another robber tribe.

Justice of right is always to take precedence over might.

The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. Try to make people moral, and you lay the groundwork for vice.

Strength and success; they are above morality, above criticism. It seems then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it.

You can't slice up morals.

It is good insofar as it is not evil.

I doubt not, but from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out.