Ethics Quotes

“Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.”
― Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

“There is always only one question in the ethics of truth: how will I, as some-one, continue to exceed my own being?”
― Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

“It is now an easy matter to spell out the ethic of a truth: 'Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds you perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you.”
― Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

“ethics oscillates between two complementary desires: a conservative desire, seeking global recognition for the legitimacy of the order peculiar to our ‘Western’ position – the interweaving of an unbridled and impassive economy [économie objective sauvage] with a discourse of law; and a murderous desire that promotes and shrouds, in one and the same gesture, an integral mastery of life – or again, that dooms what is to the ‘Western’ mastery of death. This is why ethics would be better named – since it speaks Greek – a ‘eu-oudénose’, a smug nihilism.”
― Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

“Every age – and in the end, none is worth more than any other – has its own figure of nihilism. The names change, but always under these names (‘ethics’, for example) we find the articulation of conservative propaganda with an obscure desire for catastrophe.”
― Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil