Justice & Moral Duty

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about language, ideas, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense.

Rumi Masnavi & Divan-e Shams

To draw up such a law–book as Manu’s means to lay before a people the possibility of future mastery, of attainable perfection—it permits them to aspire to the highest reaches of the art of life.

Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra & Beyond Good and Evil

Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.

Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus & Notebooks

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories, and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals.

Søren Kierkegaard Either/Or & Journals

I should liken Kant to a man at a ball, who all evening has been carrying on a love affair with a masked beauty in the vain hope of making a conquest, when at last she throws off her mask and reveals herself to be his wife.

Arthur Schopenhauer Parerga and Paralipomena

He who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.

Baruch Spinoza Ethics (Ethica)

Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.

Michel de Montaigne Essais

Hindus are "a peaceful and innocent people, equally incapable of hurting others or of defending themselves.

Voltaire Candide & Philosophical Dictionary

Division of labor is a justification for sloth.

Leo Tolstoy War and Peace & A Calendar of Wisdom

Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.

William Shakespeare First Folio & Sonnets

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Oscar Wilde De Profundis & Essays

Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

Mark Twain Notebooks & Autobiography

As Arkwright and Whitney were the demi-gods of cotton, so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to every plant. There is not a property in nature but a mind is born to seek and find it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays: First and Second Series

Even the best things are not equal to their fame.

Henry David Thoreau Walden

Muslims must realize and admit the wrongs perpetrated under the Islamic rule.

Mahatma Gandhi The Story of My Experiments with Truth

I had no specific belief except that our cause was just, was very strong and it was winning more and more support.

Nelson Mandela Long Walk to Freedom

You don't have to think about doing the right thing. If you're for the right thing, then you do it without thinking.

Maya Angelou I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings & Essays

Reportedly uttered in response to outrage over an acquaintance's moral failings, Einstein's "silent vice" quip suggests a preference for discreet imperfection over boastful righteousness.

Albert Einstein Ideas and Opinions

With insufficient data it is easy to go wrong.

Carl Sagan Cosmos & Pale Blue Dot

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

Rabindranath Tagore Gitanjali & Stray Birds

Political antisemitism developed because the Jews were a separate body, while social discrimination arose because of the growing equality of Jews with all other groups.

Hannah Arendt The Human Condition

Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.

Simone de Beauvoir The Ethics of Ambiguity

Of course not. After all, I may be wrong...

Bertrand Russell The Conquest of Happiness

Do what is right, though the world may perish.

Immanuel Kant Critique of Practical Reason

There cannot be friendship without equality.

Swami Vivekananda Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda

Wherever you are, remember that you are equally within the power of the conqueror.

Cicero De Officiis & Tusculan Disputations