The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one...'s clean linen in public.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations ... is its determination to act, its joy in ac...tion, the assurance of being able to change things by one's own efforts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While criticism or fear of punishment may restrain us from doing wrong, it does not make us wish to do right. Disregarding this si...mple fact is the great error into which parents and educators fall when they rely on these negative means of correction. The only effective discipline is self-discipline, motivated by the inner desire to act meritoriously in order to do well in one's own eyes, according to one's own values, so that one may feel good about oneself may "have a good conscience."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If one had to worry about one's actions in respect of other people's ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or mar...ried to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The terrible thing is that one cannot be a Communist and not let oneself in for the shameful act of recantation. One cannot be a C...ommunist and preserve an iota of one's personal integrity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Only that type of story deserves to be called moral that shows us that one has the power within oneself to act, out of the convict...ion that there is something better, even against one's own inclination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It becomes clear at once that patriotism undoubtedly belongs to the positive realm. The very word says as much: love of fatherland.... Or is that perhaps giving too lofty an appraisal of the concept in the course of translating it? If the characteristic of true love is that it gives more than it asks, then the good patriot should examine his own sentiment. An inborn attachment to what is one's own does not of itself deserve the name of love. If the state is at peace and is as well-governed as a human community can be, then the citizen's loyalty to his country, his services to it in the forms of energy, devotion, and funds, in general coincide with his own vital interests. The fatherland repays his loyalty by giving him safety, justice, and sometimes even freedom. In fulfilling his patriotic duties he is not performing an act of love. Only when the fatherland is in danger does his giving become a sacrifice, his serving a suffering, his loyalty a love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What then is the relation of law to morality? Law cannot prescribe morality, it can prescribe only external actions and therefore ...it should prescribe only those actions whose mere fulfillment, from whatever motive, the state adjudges to be conducive to welfare. What actions are these? Obviously such actions as promote the physical and social conditions requisite for the expression and development of free--or moral--personality.... Law does not and cannot cover all the ground of morality. To turn all moral obligations into legal obligations would be to destroy morality. Happily it is impossible. No code of law can envisage the myriad changing situations that determine moral obligations. Moreover, there must be one legal code for all, but moral codes vary as much as the individual characters of which they are the expression. To legislate against the moral codes of one's fellows is a very grave act, requiring for its justification the most indubitable and universally admitted of social gains, for it is to steal their moral codes, to suppress their characters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »