J. Howard Moore: Trending quotes (page 2)

J. Howard Moore trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection
J. Howard Moore: 366   quotes 0   likes

“The inextricable way pleasure and pain are mixed up with each other in this world is a mournful fact to beings who are all the time striving for pleasure alone. In the ideal world there is no pain, no misery. There is nothing but happiness. But in our world pain seems to have been the original feeling, the first one to appear in the evolution of sentiency. Pleasure is a sort of after-thought, a secondary attribute of consciousness which developed later as an aid to pain in keeping living beings straight. Pain is a whip, a penalty. Pleasure is a reward or bribe. Pain is a curse. We are all the time trying to minimize and escape it. In an ideal world the inhabitants never have any impulses that drive them to improper acts. All their impulses are good. Every act is proper and right. Ideal beings need only to live and act in order to be happy. We are not ideal beings. Our world happens to be one affording almost unlimited opportunities for improvement.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), Contents of Ethics, pp. 52–53

Pain , Time , Penalty , Pleasure

“These wider relations and obligations implied by evolution should be included in every program designed for the amelioration of the world. To ignore them is to classify ourselves as incompetents. No one but an inferior can any longer maintain that kindness, justice, sympathy, love, honesty, humanity, and charity are not as good for dogs, horses, and fishes as they are for men; or that cruelty, hatred, and inhumanity are not he same damning things wherever they fall on living souls.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), Ethical Anxiety, pp. 42–43

Soul , Justice , Dogs , Horse

“Let us be alive. Let us be liquid. Let us be Young. The Old atrophy, because they cease to flow. Let us be loyal for ever to those heavenly banners that flutter everywhere in the airs of this age—the banners of those who strive for a Better World.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), The World to Be, p. 150

World , Age

“Ethical culture should do for human character what physical culture should do for the body. It should produce a race of kind, honest, courageous, public-spirited, and justice-loving men and women. It is all so perfectly plain. Men are moral invalids. They come into the world bearing the curse of their animal origin. They are unfit for a life of love and co-operation. The defects of human character are as well known and as well understood as the defects of the human body. They are the cause of more unhappiness to mankind than any other one thing. They can be corrected by the application of the same remedies that have proved so efficacious in the case of mental and physical defects. The school should be the mental, physical, and moral infirmary of society.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), Ethical Anxiety, p. 38–39

School , Courage , Justice , Animals

“Human institutions are inventions. They are devices to aid in the promotion of human welfare. They should be judged by the same standards of utility as agricultural implements and everything else. Whenever they can be made over to advantage, they should be made over. And whenever they can be rendered useless by something better to take their place, they should be sent without sighs or lamentations to the junkpile. Nothing is too sacred to he improved.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), The Call of the Past, pp. 9–10

“If it could be brought about that all the billions of beings who inhabit this sphere would refrain from all acts which would in any way mar the happiness of others, that moment the earth would be transformed. We have thousands of theories as to how to make the world better, and we struggle day and night to understand and control the great natural forces about us; but if we could only get inside of ourselves once and set ourselves to working right, the biggest step toward the Millennium would be taken.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), The Importance of Ethical Culture, p. 6

Night , Understanding , Nature , Way

“We know more about human heredity to-day than we did loo years ago. Human nature is not an unstained page. We come into the world with more than blank minds and helpless bodies. We come bringing with us machines, natures, which must be radically changed if we ever become more than mere fractions of men and women. Nearly all the woes of the world arise either from ignorance of the ways we should go or from hereditary waywardnesses which we bring into the world with us. It is as truly the function of the school to correct these inherent defects in our acting machinery and to put sign-boards in the mind telling which ways to go and which ways to avoid as it is to tutor the understanding or guide the growing body.”

J. Howard Moore

Ethics and Education (1912), Preface

School , Understanding , Nature , Way

“Oh, the hope of the centuries and the centuries and centuries to come! It seems sometimes that I can almost see the shining spires of that Celestial Civilisation that man is to build in the ages to come on this earth—that Civilisation that will jewel the land masses of this planet in that sublime time when Science has wrought the miracles of a million years, and Man, no longer the savage he now is, breathes Justice and Brotherhood to every being that feels.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), Conclusion, p. 215

Time , Justice , Hope , Age

“It ought to be perfectly clear by this time that the popularity and unpopularity of propositions in no way coincide with their truth and falsity. It makes no difference how true a proposition may be or how unreservedly it may finally be accepted by mankind, there is always a period in its early life when it is stoned and misunderstood. It has been so throughout the ages of the past; it is true to-day; and it will continue to be true as long as disparities in heroism and originality exist among men.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), Conclusion, p. 211

Time , Past , Truth , Age

“Man is but a single sector in the great circle of sentient life. The human species is one among a million or two of species inhabiting the earth. The beings below and around us have had the same origin as we have. They have the same general architecture of both body and mind, and are footballed by the same antithetical impulses of pleasure and pain. Whatever the beings of this world have been in the past, they can never again be anything but a family.”

J. Howard Moore

Universal ethics is a corollary of universal kinship. Moral obligation is as boundless as feeling.
Source: Ethics and Education (1912), Ethical Anxiety, p. 42

Family , Pain , Past , Pleasure

“Socialism is inevitable. It is right. It is in the line of least resistance. It is on the way to the highlands—on the way to Real Civilisation, not the starched, hypocritical, supposititious, so-called kind palmed off by pietists and pickpockets, such as we are called upon to contemplate and endure around us to-day, but a civilisation based on the shining and imperishable foundations of Brotherhood and Mutual Love.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), Flashlights on Human Progress, p. 198

Way , Love , Making love

“The defect in this argument is that it assumes that the basis of ethics is life, whereas ethics is concerned, not with life, but with consciousness. The question ever asked by ethics is not, Does the thing live? but. Does it feel? It is impossible to do right and wrong to that which is incapable of sentient experience. Ethics arises with consciousness and is coextensive with it.”

J. Howard Moore

We have no ethical relation to the clod, the molecule, or the scale sloughed off from our skin on the back of our hand, because the clod, the molecule, and the scale have no feeling, no soul, no anything rendering them capable of being affected by us [...] The fact that a thing is an organism, that it has organisation, has in itself no more ethical significance than the fact that it has symmetry, or redness, or weight.
Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Survival of the Strenuous, p. 169

Life , Feeling , Question

“In the ideal universe the life and happiness of no being are contingent on the suffering and death of any other, and the fact that in this world of ours life and happiness have been and are to-day so commonly maintained by the infliction of misery and death by some beings on others is the most painful fact that ever entered an enlightened mind.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Survival of the Strenuous, p. 167

Pain , Suffering , Universe , World

“Nature is the universe, including ourselves. And are we not all the time tinkering at the universe, especially the garden patch that is next to us—the earth? Every time we dig a ditch or plant a field, dam a river or build a town, form a government or gut a mountain, slay a forest or form a new resolution, or do anything else almost, do we not change and reform Nature, make it over again and make it more acceptable than it was before? Have we not been working hard for thousands of years, and do our poor hearts not almost faint sometimes when we think how far, far away the millennium still is after all our efforts, and how long our little graves will have been forgotten when that blessed time gets here?”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Survival of the Strenuous, p. 164

Time , Mountain , Heart , Nature

“Man is not advised to sit down and fold his hands and roll his eyes piously toward the traditional source of good, and allow himself to be eaten up by tigers and ticks. And no one who reads honestly what has gone before can come to any such conclusion. Anything can be misrepresented if the one who attempts it is ingenious and determined enough. It is recognised that this is not an ideal world, and that it is impossible for any being to act among the evil as he would be able to act among the good. It is simply insisted that man shall ignore the urgings of his lower nature and do the best he can in the circumstances. Men do not and cannot act ideally toward their fellow-men, but they think they act nobly when they do the best they can. And, oh, if man would only try to be just to his fellow-races, what a different world he could make of it! If one is disposed to be wayward, it is astonishing what an array of excuses even the simpleton can scrape up in defence of himself. But if one is resolved on that higher life, ever held up to us by the better elements of our nature, it is also surprising how successful one can be, even among adverse conditions.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Perils of Over-population, pp. 161–162

Reading , Success , Nature , Thinking

“If man acted unkindly toward non-human beings only when he had to do so in order to avoid harm to himself—if he were as economical in his injuries to others as he would be if he had to endure them himself—the violence which to-day marks his dominion of the planet would be reduced to a mere vestige of what it is.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Perils of Over-population, p. 155

“The great trouble is that individuals and races in their treatment of each other are not guided by the same high standards of impartiality as an individual organism in dealing with his own organs and parts. Life is not one. It lacks unity of feeling and purpose. And as long as it lacks this oneness it will lack justice.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Perils of Over-population, p. 153

Feeling , Life , Justice , Parting

“The question is not. Shall man be master of the earth? but. What sort of a master shall he be? Shall he be cruel and selfish, bigoted and imperialistic, thinking only of himself and sacrificing the interests of others to his own heartless purposes? or shall he be the responsible administrator of the universe, presiding over the affairs of the earth honourably and equitably, with a mind single to the good of all? Shall he be a savage despot or a schoolmaster? a feared and hated monster, or a wise, patient, and affectionate father? Since he has become the manager of the planet, shall he manage it as he would wish it to be managed if he were a subordinate and some other race had succeeded to the superintendency, or shall he cut loose from all moral obligations, ignore the promptings of his better self, and run things absolutely in the interest of himself? Which shall it be—the great law of love or the savage law of might?”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Perils of Over-population, pp. 149–150

Selfishness , Hate , Law , Question

“Every crime almost is a good thing, looked at from the exclusive standpoint of the criminal. If it were not so, it would never be committed. But from the standpoint of the one on whom the crime falls it is likely to be a very different thing—how different depends on the degree of diversity of the interests involved. The only rational method of judging conduct, and the only method that should ever be employed by beings pretending to be logical or civilised, is to balance the effects which the act on trial has on the different interests involved, and then render a verdict from the standpoint of this balance, which is the standpoint of the universe.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), Human Attitude Toward Others, p. 53

Universe , Dependency

“Look at the scenes to be met with in our great cities! They are sufficient to horrify any being susceptible enough to the sufferings of others to be rated as one-fifth civilized. An army of butchers standing in blood ankle-deep and plunging great knives into writhing, shrieking living beings; helpless swine swinging by their hinders with their blood gushing from their slashed jugulars; unsuspecting oxen with trustful eyes looking up at the deadly pole-ax, and a moment later lying aquiver under its relentless thud; an atmosphere in perpetual churn with the groans and screams of the dying; streets thronged with unprocessioned funerals; dead bodies dangling from sale hooks or sprawling on chopping blocks; men and women going about praying and preaching, and sitting down two or three times a day and pouncing on the uncoffined remains of some poor creature cut down for them by the callous hands of hired cutthroats—such are the sights in all our streets and stockyards, and such are the crimes inflicted day after day by Christian cannibals on the defenseless dumb ones of this world.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: The New Ethics (1907), Human Attitude Toward Others, p. 44

Time , Swine , Dead , Suffering