Books Quote by William Empson

“To me, the best, if not the only function of imaginative writing, is to lead the human imagination outward, to take it into the…

— Clark Ashton Smith

Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is…

— Anonymous

“People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not…

— Harold Bloom

Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our reality may…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“[...] imaginative literature situates itself somewhere between truth and meaning [...]”

— Harold Bloom

Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its)—Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has…

— Walt Whitman

Conscience is what? It is putting together a moral act and a moral ideal, and measuring the act by the ideal. It is putting…

— Lyman Abbott

Any nation or government that deprives an individual of freedom is in that moment committing an act of moral and spiritual murder. Any individual…

— Martin Luther King, Jr

“people do, in fact, act against their moral convictions and this is an unhappy fact about ourselves’.”

— Gurcharan Das

For an act to be moral the intention must be based on compassion, not duty. We do something because we want to do it,…

— Arthur Schopenhauer

“The freedom to make moral choices is the most important freedom we have; the freedom to act on our moral choices is the most…

— Ann Furedi

As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others.

— Joel Bakan