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After three and a half centuries I have found, for an empirical ethics, no better starting axiom than this: cruelty and evil are virtually synonyms. Human ethical teachers have insisted over the ages that a cruel act is an evil act, and men on the whole endorse the doctrine no matter how repeatedly they violate it. There is inevitable revulsion against any blatant attempt to make cruelty a law of behavior.

— Edgar Pangborn A Mirror for Observers (1954)

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More quotes by Edgar Pangborn

I learned some years back that human nature is volatile stuff in a world full of lighted matches.

A Mirror for Observers (1954)

If you’re interested in ethics, you could do worse than think in terms of geological time.

A Mirror for Observers (1954)

One who can define kindness only as the absence of cruelty has surely not begun to understand the nature of either.

Good Neighbors and Other Strangers (1972)

I notice men themselves have never invented a god capable of understanding them.

A Mirror for Observers (1954)

One would think that the mere shortness of life would be a reminder that to destroy beauty is to destroy one’s own self too.

A Mirror for Observers (1954)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Edgar Pangborn (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.