“I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.”
More from Anthony Burgess on Philosophy
“Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness.”
“Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?”
“When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.”
“Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”
“The heresy of an age of reason. I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.”
“It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.”
“The heresy of an age of reason,' or some such slovos [words]. 'I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.”
“The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet.”
Others on Philosophy
Ludwig Wittgenstein
22 quotes“The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.”
Nietzsche
22 quotes“One does not hate as long as one has a low esteem of someone, but only when one esteems him as an equal or a superior.”
Christopher Hitchens
22 quotes“How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of...”
Carl Jung
21 quotes“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”
Immanuel Kant
20 quotes“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”
Heraclitus
19 quotes“All things flow nothing abides.”
H. L. Mencken
17 quotes“We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”
C.S. Lewis
15 quotes“[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.”
Samuel Beckett
14 quotes“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
14 quotes“Consciousness is man's greatest misfortune, still I know that man loves it and will not exchange it for any satisfaction...”
Napoleon
14 quotes“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.”
Isaac Asimov
13 quotes“Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience.”