Every high degree of power always involves a corresponding degree of freedom from good and evil.
Good and evil have nothing to do with gods. It has to do with us.
Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice... Man has to be a man-by choice; he has to hold his life as a value-by choice; he has to learn to sustain it-by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
The first duty of man is to take none of the principles of conduct upon trust; to do nothing without a clear and individual conviction that it is right to be done.
Property is desirable as the ground work of moral independence, as a means of improving the faculties, and of doing good to others, and as the agent in all that distinguishes the civilized man from the savage.
Moral liberty is the power of following, in all circumstances, our sense of right and wrong, or of acting in conformity to our reflecting and moral principles, without being controlled by any contrary principles.
Each person must discover his own philosophy of life, and it is not fair or right to impose our codes upon others. It is also our responsibility, however, to share, one with another, such experiences as may have common value.
If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
If we empower ourselves with responsibility over our actions, responsibility over our destinies and responsibility for directing and maintaining and creating our own ethical and moral frameworks, which is the most important thing really isn’t it because perhaps the greatest insult to humanism is this idea that mankind needs a god in order to have a moral framework.
The nobility of a human being is strictly independent of that of his convictions.
I have lived according to rules that I embrace, but I don't feel like my job is to force others to embrace the rules that I embrace for myself.
Punishment renders autonomy of conscience impossible.
The will is truly free, when it is not the slave of vices and sins.
You get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right.
A man's own conscience is his sole tribunal, and he should care no more for that phantom "opinion" than he should fear meeting a ghost if he crossed the churchyard at dark.
Everyone must act according to the dictates of his own reason.
Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
The deepest, the intelligible, part of the nature of man is that part which does not take refuge in causality, but which chooses in freedom the good or the bad.
I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or to reject the dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his own behavior. And as it turned out, many subjects did, indeed, choose to reject the experimenter's commands, providing a powerful affirmation of human ideals.
I do not want any patronage, as I do not give any. I am a lover of my own liberty, and so I would do nothing to restrict yours. I simply want to please my own conscience which is God.
Virtue could see to do what Virtue would by her own radiant light, though sun and moon where in the flat sea sunk.
It must always be remembered that you can never do right until you are first free to do wrong; since the doing of a thing under compulsion is evidence neither of good nor bad intent; and if under compulsion, who shall decide what would be the substituted rule of action under full freedom?
Man must now assume the responsibility for his world. He can no longer shove it off on religious power.
Men and women who refuse to acknowledge God's existence do so, in the final analysis, because it is contrary to their manner of living. They do not want to bow to the moral claims of a holy God on their lives.
