The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs... from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the i...nfinite.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics;... I speak of the infinite.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For aesthetics is the mother of ethics.... Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their po...litical programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe--not empirically, alas, but only theoretically--that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What side of American life is not touched by this antithesis? What explanation of American life is more central or more illuminati...ng? In everything one finds this frank acceptance of twin values which are not expected to have anything in common: on the one hand, a quite unclouded, quite unhypothetical assumption of aesthetic theory ("high ideals"), on the other a simultaneous acceptance of catchpenny realities. Between university ethics and business ethics, between American culture and American humour, between Good Government and Tammany, between academic pedantry and pavement slang, there is no community, no genial middle ground. The very accent of the words "Highbrow" and "Lowbrow" implies an instinctive perception that this is a very unsatisfactory state of affairs. For both are used in a derogatory sense. The "Highbrow" is the superior person whose virtue is admitted but felt to be an inept unpalatable virtue; while the "Lowbrow" is a good fellow one readily takes to, but with a certain scorn for him and all his works.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
English literature is a kind of training in social ethics.... English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is ...conducive to action.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A nation's domestic and foreign policies and actions should be derived from the same standards of ethics, honesty and morality whi...ch are characteristic of the individual citizens of the nation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch o...f a soft buck.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »