Selective Morality Quotes

Indifference to Reality. All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.

When I would work freelance in production in Chicago, there were a lot of times when I was working for cheap, bad people, and I was working for slave wages anyway, so there were some times when I might have filled out a couple of blank taxi receipts and kept some petty cash. But like I say, I was very selective. It was only people that I thought were assholes. The people that I liked I went far and above saving them money, much less taking it. But that's it. I'm pretty moral. I don't even like stealing jokes.

The battle going on over gay marriage in America reveals an awful lot. The Bible belt - people hate gay people. Because the Bible tells them? No, the Bible tells them an awful lot of things that they ignore.

I believe in censorship when it benefits me.

Back when Saddam Hussein was in power, the Americans didn't care about his crimes. When he was gassing the Kurds and gassing Iran, they didn't care about it. When oil was at stake, somehow, suddenly, things mattered.

I feel about Photoshop the way some people feel about abortion. It is appalling and a tragic reflection on the moral decay of our society…unless I need it, in which case, everybody be cool.

It was very interesting to me that when Louisiana was destroyed in that flood the fundamentalists were very quick to say, it's the punishment of God on a sinful city. Now that the oil industry has been so hard hit in Galveston, are they up on their pulpits saying, God is punishing the oil industry? No, no, no!

Everybody's out there to make a case and sometimes a little hypocrisy gets involved with that case.

Whenever you see, in an official lectionary, the command to omit two or three verses, you can normally be sure that they contain words of judgment. Unless, of course, they are about sex.

Many people will automatically develop a sort of selective morality. They will have one set of ethics—the one they were taught as children and been used to all their lives—for judging their selves and their friends. They will have another, and a much lower one, for the President of the United States.

I think that as human beings we tend to compartmentalize, and we have a selective morality based on the situation we're in.

Some people don't want to be morally consistent. They just want to be tied to their one issue.