“Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.”

—  Ayn Rand , book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience." by Ayn Rand?
Ayn Rand photo
Ayn Rand 322
Russian-American novelist and philosopher 1905–1982

Related quotes

John Jay photo

“We perceive that a great breach has been made in the moral and physical systems by the introduction of moral and physical evil; how or why, we know not; so, however, it is, and it certainly seems proper that this breach should be closed and order restored.”

John Jay (1745–1829) American politician and a founding father of the United States

Letter to (22 August 1774), as published in The Life of John Jay (1833) by William Jay, Vol. 2, p. 345.
1770s, Letter to Lindley Murray (1774)
Context: Among the strange things of this world, nothing seems more strange than that men pursuing happiness should knowingly quit the right and take a wrong road, and frequently do what their judgments neither approve nor prefer. Yet so is the fact; and this fact points strongly to the necessity of our being healed, or restored, or regenerated by a power more energetic than any of those which properly belong to the human mind.
We perceive that a great breach has been made in the moral and physical systems by the introduction of moral and physical evil; how or why, we know not; so, however, it is, and it certainly seems proper that this breach should be closed and order restored. For this purpose only one adequate plan has ever appeared in the world, and that is the Christian dispensation. In this plan I have full faith. Man, in his present state, appears to be a degraded creature; his best gold is mixed with dross, and his best motives are very far from being pure and free from earth and impurity.

Albert Camus photo

“What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this?"
"I don't know. My… my code of morals, perhaps."
"Your code of morals. What code, if I may ask?”

Albert Camus book The Plague

"Comprehension."
The Plague (1947)

“Morals: They’re nothing but a coded survival instinct!”

Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human

Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 3, p. 175

“Moral judgments may conflict with one another. Two conflicting moral judgments cannot both be right. This does not mean that the moral intuition itself is subject to error, but merely that we may fail to disentangle the intuition itself from irrelevances, or may unconsciously pretend to have an intuition when we actually have it not. The intuition itself is infallible; but we can never be sure that we have it, or that we have not confused it, or expressed it falsely in words. In the same way sense-experience is infallible, but we may unconsciously pretend to have it when we have, it not, and we may misdescribe it, and so on.”

Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) British novelist and philosopher

Philosophy and Living (1939)

Nayef Al-Rodhan photo

“The notion of innate knowledge (including moral knowledge) is rejected, but that of moral sensitivities is accepted.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.108

Neal Stephenson photo

“That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.”

Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer

Source: The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

H.L. Mencken photo

“It is moral by his code to get into office by false pretences. It is moral to change convictions overnight. Anything is moral that furthers the main concern of his soul, which is to keep a place at the public trough.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

On elected politicians
1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)

Theodore Kaczynski photo

“There are two kinds of morality—the kind of morality that one imposes on oneself and the kind of morality that one imposes on others. For the first kind of morality, that is, for self-restraint, I have the greatest respect. The second kind of morality I do not respect except when it constitutes self-defense. (For example, when women say that rape and wife-beating are immoral, that is self-defense.) I have noticed that the people who try hardest to impose moral code on others (not in self-defense) are often the least careful to abide by that moral code themselves.”

Theodore Kaczynski (1942) American domestic terrorist, mathematician and anarchist

"Morality and Revolution"
The Road to Revolution (2008)

William O. Douglas photo

“Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting, Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957)
Judicial opinions

“No moral code is right, correct, true. That's nihilism. And we have to accept it.”

Alexander Rosenberg (1946) American philosopher

The Atheist's Guide to Reality (2011)
Context: Scientism starts with the idea that the physical facts fix all the facts, including the biological ones. These in turn have to fix the human facts—the facts about us, our psychology, and our morality. After all, we are biological creatures, the result of a biological process that Darwin discovered but that the physical facts ordained. As we have just seen, the biological facts can't guarantee that our core morality (or any other one, for that matter) is the right, true, or correct one. If the biological facts can't do it, then nothing can. No moral code is right, correct, true. That's nihilism. And we have to accept it.

Related topics