Leo Tolstoy Quotes

Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.

I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.

There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current one, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Politicians may do as they please, so long as they violate no rule of right, no principle of justice, no law of God; but in no world, in no order, or condition, have men the right to do wrong.

Truth is not half way between right and wrong;

The majority never has right on its side.

Equality is the measure of all things, and bad behavior is less bad if everyone indulges in it.

Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

Modern morality is all about perception.

There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.

In any society that is governed by the rule of law, some form of morality is always imposed. It's inescapable.

Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.

To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.

At times, morality can be dismissed as a matter of personal conscience, no matter how widespread its acceptance. Ethics, on the other hand, arises from societal or group commitments to principia of behavior.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

I didn't grow up with any concept of people being deviants unless they mistreated others.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

The majority is always sane.

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.