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Chance Quotes

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Chance Quotes

“Moral decay first hampers and then strangles honest government, regular commerce, and even the ability to take genuine pleasure in the goods of this world. Compulsion is applied from above as self-discipline relaxes below, and the last liberties expire under the weight of a unitary state.... Since religion has lost its empire over the souls of men, the most prominent boundary that divided good from evil is overthrown; kings and nations are guided by chance and none can say where are the natural limits of despotism and the bound of license.”

“If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.”

Ifs Enough Philosophy Political Wish Chance Moral Opinion Messages Entertainment Good Enough Playwright Spices Craftsman Political Opinions

Author:Noel Coward

“Moral virtue is ... a mean between two vices, that of excess and that of defect, and ... it is no small task to hit the mean in each case, as it is not, for example, any chance comer, but only the geometer, who can find the center of a given circle.”

Mean Two Given Chance Moral Cases Virtue Example Morality Tasks Vices Circles Excess Defects Moral Virtues

Book:The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle

Source: The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle

“Even if animal experiments did result in a cure for AIDS, of which there is no chance, I'd be against it on moral grounds.”

Ifs Chance Animal Results Moral Aids Experiments Cures

Author:Ingrid Newkirk

“The response of the men who were introduced into polygamy between 1841 and 1846 was anything but enthusiastic. The same was true of the women who were offered the chance of becoming plural wives. Apart from the fact that the new system collided with moral assumptions they had grown up with, there were practical difficulties that made polygamy less attractive. For the men to support additional wives was seldom easy.”

Men Made Facts Easy Chance Moral Support Wife He Man Becoming Difficulty Response Practicals Attractive Assumption Enthusiastic Polygamy

Book:The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-Day Saints

Source: The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-Day Saints

“An earthly immortality belongs to a great and good character. History embalms it; it lives in its moral influence, in its authority, in its example, in the memory of the words and deeds in which it was manifested; and as every age adds to the illustrations of its efficacy, it may chance to be the best understood by a remote posterity.”

Source: Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions

“In such a society as ours the only possible chance for change, for mobility, for political, economic, and moral flow lies in the tactics of guerrilla warfare, in the use of fictions, of language.”

Use Political Lying Language Chance Fiction Moral Economic Flow Warfare Tactics Mobility Guerrillas Guerrilla Warfare

Book:Bodies of Work: Essays

Source: Bodies of Work: Essays

“We recognize that our progress as a species does not have to be defined in terms of wealth or material and physical growth any more than our progress as individuals has to be defined in terms of physical growth. Physical growth of the body reaches a limit, but the character and the soul of the individual continues to grow, or at least has a chance to continue, often to our last breath. It is simple minded to define our well being in material terms, when that well-being has an aesthetic dimension, and intellectual dimension, a moral dimension.”

“Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality, an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it. The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil.”

Source: The Political Writings of John Adams: Representative Selections

“Yet it would be unfair to the generality of our kind to ascribe to their intellectual and moral weakness the gradual divergence of Buddhism and Christianity from their primitive patterns. For it should not be forgotten that by their glorification of poverty and celibacy both these religions struck straight at the root not merely of civil society but of human existence. The blow was parried by the wisdom or the folly of the vast majority of mankind, who refused to purchase a chance of saving their souls with the certainty of extinguishing the species.”

“That all war is physically frightful is obvious; but if that were a moral verdict, there would be no difference between a torturer and a surgeon. There are certain intellectuals who are too bright to be content with merely praising peace but who are infuriated by anybody praising war. If no war is possible, all criminality has its chance”

Ifs War Would Be Certain Differences Chance Moral Praise Obvious Surgeons No War Verdict Criminality

Author:Gilbert K. Chesterton