[R]eason is... given to us as a practical faculty, that is, as one that influences the will.

A society that is not willing to demand a life of somebody who has taken somebody else’s life is simply immoral.

Ghost stories are always listened to and well received in private, but pitilessly disavowed in public. For my own part, ignorant as I am of the way in which the human spirit enters the world and the way in which he goes out of it, I dare not deny the truth of many such narratives.

If a man is often the subject of conversation he soon becomes the subject of criticism.

Deaths, births, and marriages, considering how much they are separately dependent on the freedom of the human will, should seem to be subject to no law according to which any calculation could be made beforehand of their amount; and yet the yearly registers of these events in great countries prove that they go on with as much conformity to the laws of nature as the oscillations of the weather.

Act so that the maxim of your act could be made the principle of a universal law.

Do what is right, though the world may perish.