Man is a moral being, only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it.
A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society.
There's not much practical Christianity in the man who lives on better terms with angels and seraphs than with his children, servants and neighbours.
In fact, punk rock means exemplary manners to your fellow human beings.
Even if we could suppose the citizen body to be virtuous, without each of them being so, yet the latter would be better, for in the virtue of each the virtue of all is involved.
We know that where community exists in confers upon its members identity, a sense of belonging, and a measure of security. . . . Communities are the ground-level generators and preservers of values and ethical systems.
Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.
The conscience of a people is their power.
For when was public virtue to be found Where private was not?
It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.
_0_thumbnail_47x47.jpg "John Gardner in 1979"){kind=small}
