Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes

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

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

The problem of good as it faces the atheist is this: Nature, which is the nuts-and-bolts reality for the atheist, has no values and thus can offer no grounding for good and evil. Values on the atheist view are subjective and contingent.

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

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

All universal moral principles are idle fancies.

Relativity must replace absolutism in the realm of morals as well as in the spheres of physics and biology.

Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.

Of God and Evil, there is nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common Rule of Good and Evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves.

I have never obtained any ethical values from my scientific work.

There are many religions, but there is only one morality.

We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becomes a world without value.

Right and wrong are not the product of census.

Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.

Moral principles do not depend on a majority vote. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong. Right is right, even if nobody is right.

Not in opinion but in nature is law founded.

You cannot have a boundary-less existence, because your neighbor has his own boundaries, and who is going to give you the ethics between the two boundaries? If there is no objective moral law, relativism will take hold, and relativism ultimately will lead to self-destruction.

I don't subscribe to relativism, whether it's in political philosophy, foreign policy or in life.

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.

Nothing is evil which is according to nature.

The ethic of truth is the complete opposite of an 'ethics of communication'. It is an ethic of the Real The ethic of truth is absolutely opposed to opinion, and to ethics in general.

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

Well, I believe in the idea of 'normal' in the way that I believe in the idea of logic. Or the idea of character. All of these ethical constructs are just that: constructs.

The atheist is cheating whenever he makes a moral judgment, acting as though it has an objective reference, when his philosophy in fact precludes it.

It's simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.