The Quotes canon
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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Mark Twain2 quotes
Each race determines for itself what indecencies are. Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them. — Mark Twain · 1896To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours. — Mark Twain · 1896William Shakespeare2 quotes
There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. — William Shakespeare · 1616Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime by action dignified. — William Shakespeare · 1597Alfred North Whitehead1 quote
What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike. — Alfred North Whitehead · 1941Bertolt Brecht1 quote
Food comes first, then morals. — Bertolt Brecht · 1928Cicero1 quote
There exists a law, inborn of our hearts by natural intuition, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right. — Cicero · 52 BCDaniel Defoe1 quote
Actions receive their tincture from the times,
And as they change, are virtues made or crimes. — Daniel Defoe · 1703Hermann Busenbaum1 quote
The end justifies the means. — Hermann Busenbaum · 1650James Fitzjames Stephen1 quote
Complete moral tolerance is possible only when men have become completely indifferent to each other-that is to say, when society is at an end. — James Fitzjames Stephen · 1873Jim Casy1 quote
Maybe there ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue, they's just what people does. Some things folks do is nice and some ain't so nice, and that's all any man's got a right to say. — Jim Casy · 1940Niccolo Machiavelli1 quote
He [the prince] holds to what is right when he can but knows how to do wrong when he must. — Niccolo Machiavelli · 1532Pope Benedict XVI1 quote
We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires. — Pope Benedict XVI · 2005Publilius Syrus1 quote
For a good cause, wrongdoing is virtuous. — Publilius Syrus · 43 BC