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.
“Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.”
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
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Ayn Rand 322
Russian-American novelist and philosopher 1905–1982Related quotes
“Morals: They’re nothing but a coded survival instinct!”
Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 3, p. 175
Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.108
Source: The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
On elected politicians
1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)
"Morality and Revolution"
The Road to Revolution (2008)
“Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.”
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.”
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.