A Quote by Publilius Syrus

For a good cause, wrongdoing is virtuous.

Publilius Syrus

Quote Topics

Cause Good Good Cause Virtuous Wrongdoing

Quote Author

Publilius Syrus
Roman - Writer
85 BC - 43 BC

The good man is he for whom, because he is virtuous, the things that are absolutely good are good; it is also plain that his use of these goods must be virtuous and in the absolute sense good.

Aristotle

Some are born virtuous, some become virtuous. To be good by nature is indeed fortunate but to become good is like walking on a double-edged sword; it takes a longer time and is more painful.

Umera Ahmed

In order to become soundly virtuous, it is advisable to make good practical resolutions concerning particular acts of the virtues and to be faithful in carrying the out afterwards. Without doing that, one is often virtuous only in one's imagination.

Vincent de Paul

Find out for yourself what is truth, what is real. Discover that there are virtuous things and there are non-virtuous things. Once you have discovered for yourself give up the bad and embrace the good.

Gautama Buddha

It is a very easy thing to devise good laws; the difficulty is to make them effective. The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws; and consequently the greatest art of a politician is to render vices serviceable to the cause of virtue.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

Every mind has its particular standard of good and bad, and of right and wrong. This standard is made by what one has experienced through life, by what one has seen or heard; it also depends upon one's belief in a certain religion, one's birth in a certain nation and origin in a certain race. But what can really be called good or bad, right or wrong, is what comforts the mind and what causes it discomfort. It is not true, although it appears so, that it is discomfort that causes wrongdoing. In reality, it is wrongdoing which causes discomfort, and it is right-doing which gives comfort.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

The government would assert that individuals who are aware of serious wrongdoing in the intelligence community should bring their concerns to the people most responsible for that wrongdoing, and rely on those people to correct the problems that those people themselves authorized.

Edward Snowden

People always ask me what I think, if Edward Snoden is a hero, if he's a villain. I don't really tend to moralize it so much as I feel like he's a whistleblower. He's someone who saw a wrongdoing and in order to shine a light on that wrongdoing had to bend some rules and break some laws along the way.

Zachary Quinto

Holding individuals accountable for corporate wrongdoing isn't ideological; it's good law enforcement.

Sally Yates

Philosophers should resist the temptation to be publicly virtuous. Given an unjust society, from the vantage of what counts as the public good, they are corrupters, not edifiers. The desire to be seen to be virtuous, to make a positive contribution, is a deleterious symptom of professionalization. Philosophy's social utility is an ersatz for its duty to mount challenges to the entire social order.

Ray Brassier

A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice. In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.

Freeman Dyson

Being virtuous is wonderful thing, but feeling virtuous is a shortcut to vice.

Julian Baggini

The most virtuous are those who content themselves with being virtuous without seeking to appear so.

Plato

There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.