Morality - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

I'm really a very good man, but I'm a very bad Wizard.

- L. Frank Baum, TheWonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

Such high ideals as they had! Beauty, Health, Strength, Intellect, Goodness - for these they prayed and worked.

- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915)

For these things which man purports to admire the most - the noble, the brilliant, the splendid - these are the very things he cannot tolerate when he finds them.

- Mark Clifton, ''What Have I Done?'' (1952)

The Lithians did not know God. They did things rightly, and thought righteously, because it was reasonable and efficient and natural to do and to think that way. They seemed to need nothing else.

- James Blish, A Case of Conscience (1958)

''Your conscience has been spoiled by constant attention; it groans at the slightest discomfort, and your reason bows before it respectfully instead of scolding it and putting it in its proper place.'' [. . .] ''I can't agree with you,'' said Maxim coldly. ''Conscience, driven by its own pain, sets the task; reason carries it out. Conscience sets ideals; reason searches for the path to fulfillment. That, precisely, is reason's function: to find that path. Without conscience, reason works only for itself; that is, it runs idle.'' ''True,'' agreed the Wizard. ''Conscience does set ideals. But ideals are called ideals because of their striking disparity with reality. [. . .] Don't let your conscience prevent you from thinking clearly, and don't let your reason be shy about pushing aside your conscience when necessary.''

- Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky, Prisoners of Power (1969), translated by Helen Saltz Jacobson (1977) Idealism is a wasting disease, a cancer.

- Gardner Dozois, ''Horse of Air'' (1971)

There's a certain moral virtue in being materialistic.

- J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)

I do not know what it is in us that (sometimes) will make us do a thing against our wishes because we know it to be good. ''Conscience'' is too thin a word, and ''God'' too misty, too spoiled by the many who mouth it constantly without any care for what they say. [. . .] The thing that I will not call Conscience or God (somewhere in the Old-Time books I think it was called Virtue, but doubtless few read them) - the thing that would never let me strike a child, or stone a criminal or a mue on the green as we are expected to do in Trempa - this mad cruel-sweet thing that may be a part of love commanded me to answer her.

- Edgar Pangborn, ''The Night Wind'' (1974)

Nothing is moral always, and anything is moral under the right circumstances.

- John Varley, ''The Persistence of Vision'' (1978)

His view of morality became more intelligible: it is something you practise when you can afford it, and I could not afford morality.

- George Turner, Drowning Towers (1987)

Cultural imperatives, meaning morality, change with the weather.

- George Turner, Drowning Towers (1987)

Character comes from following our highest sense of right, from trusting ideals without being sure they'll work. One challenge of our adventure on earth is to rise above dead systems - wars, religions, nations, destructions - to refuse to be a part of them, and express instead the highest selves we know how to be.

- Richard Bach, One (1988)