11 quotes
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
Ends and Means (1937)
One unscrupulous distortion of the truth tends to beget other and opposite distortions.
Ends and Means (1937)
The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.
Ends and Means (1937)
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.
Ends and Means (1937)
A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world — intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man.
Ends and Means (1937)
It is not only when it takes the form of physical addiction that sex is evil. It is also evil when it manifests itself as a way of satisfying the lust for power or the climber's craving for position and social distinction.
Ends and Means (1937)
Christian philosophers have found no difficulty in justifying imperialism, war, the capitalist system, the use of torture, the censorship of the press and ecclesiastical tyrannies of every sort, from the tyranny of Rome to the tyrannies of Geneva and New England.
Ends and Means (1937)
Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error — the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality.
Ends and Means (1937)
It often happens that reforms merely have the effect of transferring the undesirable tendencies of individuals from one channel to another channel. An old outlet for some particular wickedness is closed; but a new outlet is opened. The wickedness is not abolished; it is merely provided with a different set of opportunities for self-expression.
Ends and Means (1937)
First Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues, a bore; first differential equations, sheer torture. But training changes the nature of our spiritual experiences. In due course, contact with an obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of counterpoint or of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty and significance. It is the same in the moral world.
Ends and Means (1937)
Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes.
Ends and Means (1937)