Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics

ambition-and-status

• The most common form of hypocrisy among the privileged classes is to assume that their privileges are the just payments society rewards for specially useful or meritorious functions.

  MMIS-RC-076

• So persistent are moralistic illusions about politics in the middle-class world that any emphasis on cynicism will seem almost pure cynicism to those still enmeshed in the Age of Reason.

  MMIS-RC-010

obedience-and-authority

• The oppressed are allowed, once every few years, to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing classes are to represent and repress them.

  MMIS-RC-093

• If power is needed to destroy power, how is this new power to be made ethical? We seem caught in an endless cycle of social conflict.

  MMIS-RC-139

faith-and-doubt

• Once the religious quality of the proletarian creed is abandoned, evolutionary socialism may easily lose the furious energy capable of moving against society's stubborn inertia.

  MMIS-RC-134

• The terrorists were diseased idealists, morbidly oppressed by guilt of violence resting upon their class, imagining they could atone by deliberately incurring guilt for the oppressed.

  MMIS-RC-177